The real question about Bond 25

Image for the official James Bond feed on Twitter

UPDATE (9:15 a.m.): Updated with another quote and a link to another video in sixth paragraph below.

Daniel Craig’s public appearance at the New Yorker Festival has come and gone without definitive answers about Bond 25 and his future as 007. But it raised a new, and probably more important, question.

How tired is the 007 film franchise? Is it a momentary slump? Or is a deeper exhaustion?

The James Bond Radio website HAD A POST that INCLUDED A SHORT VIDEO of the Craig appearance. It includes this passage:

“There’s no conversation going on because genuinely everybody’s just a bit tired,” Craig, 48, said. “The producers are just…Barbara (Broccoli) is making a movie. I’m doing Othello, Barbara’s producing that.”

The Broccoli movie is the drama Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, now in post-production. Othello is an off-Broadway production, which has a short run starting next month. When that play is over, Craig will spend much of his 2017 working on Purity, a limited, 20-episode series for Showtime.

One shouldn’t make too much about a couple of comments. Also during the evening IN A VIDEO IN ANOTHER TWEET, Craig also said of playing Bond, “Were I to stop doing it, I’d miss it terribly.”

Still, the way Craig said “just a bit tired” made it sound like he still hasn’t recovered fully from SPECTRE, which wrapped production in mid-2015.

Meanwhile the co-bosses of Eon Productions, who don’t do a lot of interviews, have reason to be tired as well.

Both Broccoli, 56, and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, 74, have been involved with the series for decades. Both have been at it longer than Eon co-founder Albert R. Broccoli, who spent the last 35 years of his life in Bondage.

If this is a short-term thing, it’s not much of an issue. But if it’s a deeper exhaustion, there are larger concerns than whether Daniel Craig does another James Bond film or not. If Craig comes back all excited to go, it doesn’t mean much unless the rest of the creative team is equally enthusiastic.

Only Broccoli and Wilson can answer the question. All we know is everybody’s a bit tired almost a year after the most recent 007 film was released.