The long-time producer of the James Bond film franchise, Barbara Broccoli, says the next installment in the series won’t even begin filming for two years, which gives the feminists and pro-female Bond advocates plenty of time to make James Bond a female.
But Broccoli says if she has anything to do with it, Bond will remain a male.
“He’s a male character. He was written as a male and I think he’ll probably stay as a male,” Broccoli previously told The Guardian. “And that’s fine. We don’t have to turn male characters into women. Let’s just create more female characters and make the story fit those female characters.”
That won’t be good enough for most feminists, who see a female playing the iconic Bond character as a perfect statement to make in a male-dominated world of action heroes.
One former Bond, Pierce Brosnan, thinks it’s time to give a woman a chance.
“I think we’ve watched the guys do it for the last 40 years. Get out of the way, guys, and put a woman up there. I think it would be exhilarating, it would be exciting,” said Brosnan in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “The Me Too movement has been relevant and significant and well needed in our society, so they’ll have to address that,” he said, arguing that the film series must adapt to keep up with our changing society. Still, he made it clear that he didn’t think the change would happen under the film’s current producers: “I don’t think that’s going to happen with the Broccolis. I don’t think that’s going to happen under their watch.”
Ana de Armas, the mysterious Paloma — not your typical Bond girl — also believes a woman should not play James Bond.
“There’s no need for a female Bond,” de Armas recently told The Sun. “There shouldn’t be any need to steal someone else’s character, you know, to take over. This is a novel, and it leads into this James Bond world and this fantasy of that universe where he’s at.”
“What I would like is that the female roles in the Bond films, even though Bond will continue to be a man, are brought to life in a different way,” she added. “That they’re given a more substantial part and recognition. That’s what I think is more interesting than flipping things.”
Could James Bond be “reimagined” as a woman? Hollywood’s money people don’t want to know if it can be done. They want to know if they can make money off it. And looking at the recent history of “reboots” and “reimaginings,” it would be a hit-or-miss proposition.
The all-female reboot of Ghostbusters was not only a box office failure but a critical failure as well. Director Paul Feig tried to blame it on Donald Trump and “them.”
He called 2016 and “ugly year” and believes the film’s release was “intertwined with Hillary Clinton and the anti-Hillary movement.”
“It was the year where I don’t know, just everyone went to a boiling point,” Feig said.
“I don’t know if it was having an African American president for eight years teed them up or something, but they were ready to explode.”
Instead, Mr. Feig should look at the script and the wooden performances of the actresses. The film was unwatchable and is rarely aired today, even on cable.
But then there’s the successful reboot of Casino Royale. Admittedly, the 2006 production treated the subject matter far more seriously than the 1967 Peter Sellers vehicle. And the third remake of A Star is Born, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, blew away the previous iterations of the story.
Still, Bond as a woman would definitely lose something in the translation. James Bond has defined masculinity for 50 years, but it would probably please the feminists to have a woman define masculinity for the next 50.
