I’ve been a fan of the James Bond movies for as long as I can remember. I grew up catching them on TBS back when it was the Atlanta-based Superstation and Ted Turner had the rights to the MGM catalog. The Bond films had everything: clear heroes and villains, beautiful women, fast cars, fascinating gadgets, and fantastical plots.
I still enjoy most of the movies as an adult, although I’ll admit that I tend to avoid the ‘80s films. A couple of years ago, I listened to the audiobooks of Ian Fleming’s novels and gained an even greater appreciation.
Over more than 60 years and 25 films, the James Bond series has retained a certain amount of consistency thanks to the Broccoli family’s commitment to staying faithful to Fleming’s legacy. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and later his daughter Barbara and stepson Michael G. Wilson made sure that the movies didn’t go too far off the rails.
“The Broccolis treated each Bond film with a care rarely seen in the industry today,” my colleague Rick Moran wrote on Saturday. “Their attention to detail was exquisite.” But Broccoli and Wilson recently sold the rights to future films to Amazon, which owns MGM.
“Amazon reportedly paid an extra billion dollars just for the Bond films,” Rick reported. “What they craved, however, was creative control over the Bond brand. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the heads of Eon and custodians of everything related to James Bond, entered into a joint venture with Amazon MGM. The Broccolis will retain an ownership stake in Bond and his films, but Amazon MGM will be in the driver's seat creatively.”
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Naturally, the main fear is that Amazon will turn the Bond films woke. Purists have worried about that for a while now, but after seeing what Amazon did to Tolkien, there are legitimate concerns that the company will bend the Bond canon toward what Rick calls “the left's notion of ‘21st century.’"
We may well see our first black, male-to-female trans secret agent in a wheelchair, but Amazon gives us other reasons for pause. Over at the Spectator, Alexander Larman writes that “the door is open for a major auteur director like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino – both of whom have repeatedly, publicly expressed interest in making a Bond film – to step up and make their mark on the franchise, presumably with the full creative control that they would never have been allowed in the Broccoli-Wilson era.”
Larman considers this a plus, but as much as I enjoy Nolan’s films, I don’t want a Bond movie to be a brain-teasing puzzle. I mean, even the “gritty” Daniel Craig outings were frothy fun. I also don’t want 007 to turn into a Tarantinoesque violence fiend who drops more F-bombs than shots from his Walther PPK.
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Larman also writes:
No, it’s a lot more likely that the reason why Amazon have paid a supervillain’s bounty is because they want to do the same to Bond that Disney have so inexpertly done with Star Wars and Marvel and create countless spin-off franchises that they can then put on Prime. If you ever wanted to see origin stories for everyone from Blofeld and M to Moneypenny and Felix Leiter, well, you’re in luck; no doubt there will be a rush of them over the coming years. And just as the Disney exploitation of previously beloved characters has led to a dearth of creative imagination, so we can expect this particular return to the well to run out of juice very, very quickly.
That’s the biggest reason to be concerned about what Amazon could do with 007. After listening to the audiobooks of the novels, I imagined miniseries based on each one of them that remained in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s settings that Fleming envisioned, but I don’t think Amazon would be that faithful to the franchise. Instead, I half expect fans to get as tired of sideways Bond content as Star Wars and Marvel fans have gotten.
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