Deadline says Bond 25 distribution settled

Bond 25’s distribution has been settled, Deadline: Hollywood reported. with Universal taking over the international distribution.

Universal will also handle home video distribution, the entertainment website, citing sources it didn’t identify.

U.S. distribution will be through a joint venture that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Annapurna Pictures formed last year, Deadline said.

That joint venture was announced on Oct. 31. Deadline reported in November that the joint venture was “thisclose” to securing U.S. distribution rights but no formal announcement has been made.

Deadline also said the movie will debut in the U.K. on Oct. 25, 2019, with a U.S. release on Nov. 8, 2019. The U.S. release date was announced by Eon Productions and MGM on July 24, 2017.

Bond 25 will begin production on Dec. 3 of this year, Deadline said.

UPDATE (11:55 p.m.): Deadline says the studios involved confirmed the news. Danny Boyle also  is now confirmed as director, the website said.

“We are delighted to announce that the exceptionally talented Danny Boyle will be directing Daniel Craig in his fifth outing as James Bond in the 25th installment of the franchise,” Eon’s Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson said in a statement quoted by Deadline.

“We will begin shooting Bond 25 at Pinewood Studios in December with our partners at MGM and thrilled that Universal will be our international distributor.” the duo said in the statement.

The distribution deal was put together more than 300 days after the release date was announced.

 

Is it Eon or EON?

Image from the 2012 documentary Everything Or Nothing

On Facebook, the blog caught a debate whether it should be Eon Productions or EON Productions.

EON would indicate an acronym. In 1983, an updated version of Steven Jay Rubin’s The James Bond Films was published. “I’ve also discovered that Eon Productions stands for Everything or Nothing Productions, an appropriate tag,” Rubin wrote in the introduction for the update.

In the late 1990s, the officially sanctioned documentary Inside Dr. No seemed to try to debunk that idea.

NARRATOR (Patrick Macnee): For many years, some speculate the (Eon) name stands for everything or nothing.

MICHAEL G. WILSON: Cubby (Broccoli) was always…when I said to him does it mean “Everything Or Nothing,” he said, “I’ve never heard of that.”

OK. Also, eon is a word defined as “an indefinite and very long period of time, often a period exaggerated for humorous or rhetorical effect.”

Except….flash forward to the 2012 documentary Everything Or Nothing.

BARBARA BROCCOLI: Cubby and Harry (Saltzman) formed a company called Eon, everything or nothing.

Accompanying Barbara Broccoli’s quote is image of Eon business cards, where it’s spelled Eon, rather than EON.

So, over a period of years, you had the two leaders of Eon (or EON) Productions telling different versions of the company’s origin. Meanwhile, there was an officially licensed video game titled James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing.

Regardless, there are differences in English-English and American-English about how you treat acronyms. The term “public limited company” is usually abbreviated PLC in the U.S., while in the U.K., it is abbreviated as “Plc.”

Beyond that, companies love to bend the rules of English (on either side of the Atlantic Ocean). Time magazine refers to itself as TIME, even if nobody else does so. Boeing is formally The Boeing Company but The Associated Press and other news organizations simply refer to it as Boeing Co.

Going back to Eon, the company that produces James Bond films, its key figures don’t agree whether the name is an acronym or not.

On Eon’s website, the name is spelled EON. However, the company’s films, such as DR. NO, CASINO ROYALE, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, SKYFALL and SPECTRE are spelled with all capital letters. So that’s not very definitive, either.

Ultimate answer: It’s up to you. The available information is, at best, conflicting.

Early reviews for Forever and a Day start to come in

U.K. cover image for Forever and a Day, Anthony Horwitz’s second James Bond continuation novel.

Early reviews of the newest James Bond continuation novel, Forever and a Day, are coming in. The novel, by Anthony Horowitz, will be published in the U.K. on May 31. It won’t be published in the United States until November.

This is Horowitz’s second Bond novel. The first, Trigger Mortis, was set in 1957 after the events of Goldfinger. The new novel is a prequel to Casino Royale.

What follows is a mostly no-spoiler sampling of reviews. However, those who want to know absolutely nothing about the book should stop reading.

DAVID MILLS, THE SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON): “Sadly it’s very formulaic. Anyone who has read more than a couple of the post-Fleming Bond novels knows that we are going to get references to his knitted tie, love of scrambled eggs and heather honey, Scottish housekeeper, scarred cheek, moccasin shoes… There’s (much, much) more but that’s enough. Then there’s the customary sequence of scenes — meeting with M, travel to foreign location, hang out in casino, drink martini, have sex, sneak up on installation that turns out not to be an innocent industrial concern after all but the heart of the villain’s dastardly enterprise heavily guarded by goons in logoed uniforms, where, of course, Bond is spotted and causes havoc while escaping.”

STEVEN POOLE, THE GUARDIAN: “Inevitably, the prose throughout is more verbose and cliched than the brutal efficiencies of Fleming, but Forever and a Day is still an enjoyably compact thriller, with an absolutely killer last line. Scattered throughout the book, too, are some pleasingly echt Bond moments, as when he tells one of his captors: “It would be nice to know your name when I kill you.’”

BRIAN SMITH, FROM SWEDEN WITH LOVE (FAN WEBSITE): “When I wrote the review for TRIGGER MORTIS, I declared it to be the best James Bond continuation novel ever. Its position has just been usurped. FOREVER AND A DAY is a stylish and clever thriller. 16 out of 16!”

UPDATE (May 28)

 BEN MACINTYRE, THE TIMES (LONDON): “Horowitz has put together a fast-paced, skilfully written derivation on a theme so familiar most of us could hum it in our sleep. It is briefly intoxicating and unsatisfying, leaves you wanting more, and for serious Bond junkies is the next fix in a long tale of addiction.”