Mirror says Bond 25 to be based on Benson novel

Image for the official James Bond feed on Twitter

UPDATE (July 30): Raymond Benson today told the Commander Bond website via Twitter that, “I know nothing; haven’t spoken with any Mirror journalists, can only assume the article is fabrication. Would be wonderful if it were true.” He made similar comments on Facebook.

ORIGINAL POST (July 29): Consider this Caveat Emptor. No room for that in the headline

The tabloid Mirror said Saturday night that Bond 25 will be based on the Raymond Benson 007 continuation novel Never Dream of Dying.

According to the tabloid, the movie has a working title of Shatterhand, the alias Ernst Stavro Blofeld used in the novel You Only Live Twice.

However, the Mirror said the movie is based on “Never Dream Of Dying by US author Raymond Benson” which “sees Daniel Craig’s spy battle a blind supervillain” who is “behind an evil organisation called the Union.”

The tabloid quoted an unidentified “insider” as saying the movie may be filmed in Croatia.

Benson wrote six Bond continuation novels published from 1997 to 2002 as well as novelizations of three 007 films.

Never Dream of Dying was published in 2001 while the Mirror refers to it as a “1999 thriller.”

Eon Productions, which produces the Bond films, has avoided adapting continuation novels published by Ian Fleming Publications.

That changed with 2015’s SPECTRE, which adapted a torture sequence from Kingsley Amis’s 1968 Colonel Sun continuation novel. Amis’s estate received a special thanks credit in SPECTRE’s end titles.

Eon said July 24 that Bond 25 will have a release date of Nov. 8, 2019 in the United States and that the film is being written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. The New York Times reported the same day that Craig is returning for a fifth turn as Bond.

Sky News says time for 007 to retire

Logo for the Kingsman sequel due out in September.

Earlier this week, the Sky News website HAD A STORY declaring that, “James Bond is dead, long live the Kingsman!”

Essentially, writer Duarte Garrido argued that Bond’s day has passed because he’s a sexist character as well as “his covert racism and weird taste in beverages.”

The new king of spies, we’re told, is Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, from The Kingsman: The Secret Service.

“Bond was a spy for post-war veterans. Eggsy is a spy for enlightened millennials,” Garrido wrote. “Every generation has its heroes, it’s time for the old ones to retire.”

This is interesting on a number of levels.

A Bond-inspired poster for Kingsman: The Secret Service

–Kingsman: The Secret Service made homages not only to 1960s Bond movies, but Harry Palmer films as well as The Avengers and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television shows. That’s not the blog saying it. Star Colin Firth, who played Eggsy mentor Harry Hart, said it at the 2014 San Diego Comic Con.

So, it’s not exactly like Kingsman is blazing a trail. Rather, it’s more like a new take on a familiar genre.

–What about the ending of Kingsman: The Secret Service?

Sky tells us Kingsman is enlightened unlike that old sexist Bond. Remember, with Kingsman, we’re talking about a film ended with an anal sex joke.

Director Matthew Vaughn told the Cinema Blend website in 2015 that joke was another 007 homage.

It ends [on that joke] for a very strong reason. A lot of Bond movies used to end on things like Bond trying to ‘attempt re-entry,’ or ‘keeping the British end up.’ So I just thought, ‘We’ve pushed the boundary on every sort of spy cliché.’ We’ve got to end it on The Big One. And there’s only one way of doing it, taking it to the next level!

Meanwhile, Kingsman isn’t showing its superiority over Bond. It’s taking a Bond meme and taking it further. Doesn’t seem particularly enlightened.

–What about the connection between Sky and the Kingsman franchise? That would be Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

The company a 39 percent stake in Sky and wants to buy the rest. It also owns the 20th Century Fox studio, which released the 2015 Kingsman and its upcoming sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle.

That connection probably should have been noted in the Sky story.