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In terms of the films, we are — yet again — in another hiatus. This time, it’s entirely voluntary on the part of Eon Productions. Eon killed off the Daniel Craig version of Bond in No Time to Die. Where does it go from here?
The message from Eon: Don’t call us. We’ll call you.
Put another way: Bond 26? What’s that?
In the literary Bond world, Ian Fleming Publications wrapped up a trilogy written by Anthony Horowitz anchored in the Ian Fleming timeline. It’s now emphasizing a timeshifted “James Bond is missing” trilogy by Kim Sherwood with a quickly done timeshifted Charlie Higson story. The Sherwood and Higson stories have nothing to do with each other.
Higson’s tale, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, was connected to the recent coronation of King Charles III, the long-in-waiting monarch. Meanwhile, Sherwood’s trilogy still has two parts to go. More James Bond without James Bond.
For now, Bond overall is in neutral. Aside from Higson’s story, there’s not much actual Bond.
All of this, you might say, is obvious. And so it is. Regardless, it’s one of the oddest periods for Bond fans.
It’s very early to mark the 15th anniversary of The Spy Command. Still, the blog did come out in October 2008.
The blog has always sought to cut the wheat from the chaff. But some fans don’t appreciate that.
This blog has mostly been a hobby. And that has been the case for years.
Not everyone takes it that way. The blog has been accused of rooting for the box office failure of No Time to Die. Not true, but the blog posted the financial box office results.
More recently, a one-time prominent Bond fan criticized the blog. I won’t link it. Suffice it to say, the Bond fan sent me emails apparently looking for me to promote his recent publications.
Regardless, the blog will go on. The blog has always been more than James Bond. There are plenty of online places for promotion.
Kathleen Kennedy, head of Walt Disney’s Lucasfilm unit.
Kathleen Kennedy, 69, the chief of Walt Disney Co.’s Lucasfilm subsidiary, says she’s looking for guidance from the James Bond film franchise.
“I’ve often brought up Bond,” Kennedy told Empire magazine. “That’s every three or four years and there wasn’t this pressure to feel like you had to have a movie every year. I feel that was very important to Star Wars. We have to eventize this.”
Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 for more than $4 billion. Disney wanted to revive the Star Wars film franchise. The plan that emerged: Do a Star Wars film every other year (beginning in 2015), with other Star Wars-related projects coming out in-between.
Since then, there hasn’t been a Star Wars movie since 2019, while various shows have shown up on the Disney + streaming channel.
“It’s much better to tell the truth,” Kennedy told Empire, “that we’re going to make these movies when they’re ready to be made, and release them when they’re ready to be released.”
That is, more or less, the same message that Barbara Broccoli, the boss of Eon Productions, has given out regarding future James Bond films. Eon will come out with a new Bond film when it’s ready and not before.
The problem is, many Bond fans are getting impatient with such long stretches between 007 movies.The gaps are closer now to five years to six years.
The last Bond film, 2021’s No Time to Die, saw the Daniel Craig version of Bond die with a vague promise the character will return sometime, someday. Meanwhile, the early generation of Bond film fans is reaching the end, with no certainty the cinematic 007 will actually return before those fans shed their mortal coil.
In Star Wars fandom, Kathleen Kennedy is a divisive figure. In Bond fandom, so is Barbara Broccoli.
The search is still on for the next James Bond actor, but the hunt for the next 007 director is well underway and none other than Denis Villeneuve seems to be the frontrunner at the moment.
Wait? What? Oh, yes.
Back in 2017, Denis Villeneuve was supposed to be in the running to direct Bond 25 (later titled No Time to Die). Deadline: Hollywood told us so. Oops. It may turn out that way. He ended up directing a new version of Dune.
Got it.
Good grief. Maybe it comes to pass. Maybe not.
Villeneuve, supposedly, is a big Bond fan. Still, he’s a bigger Dune fan.
That’s fine. You like what you like.
At this point, go with what you like. As far as Villeneuve is concerned, I can live without the fans of the directors who attack those who “fail” to appreciate his genius.
Over the weekend, the Mail on Sunday (Sunday edition of the Daily Mail) came out with a story that claimed Phoebe Waller-Bridge was Barbara Broccoli’s first choice to direct (and co-write) Bond 26.
The article had an April 1 time stamp. A gag? Perhaps, except most April Fool’s gags come out early in the day. The Mail story didn’t come out until 5:01 p.m. New York time, which means it didn’t come out until late in the day in the U.K.
More importantly, the story, well, reeked. Reeked of bad writing and a lack of reporting. I intended to ignore it. But, as Lt. Columbo observed many times, little things bother me. Or, to quote Kerim Bey (pointing to his nose), “This is an old friend of mine. And it tells me something smells.”
Waller-Bridge’s directing experience? The talented Waller-Bridge has acting, writing, and producing credits on her IMDB.COM ENTRY. Not so much for directing credits.
Do you really want to hand over a Bond film to a directing novice?
John Glen’s first film directing credit was For Your Eyes Only (1981). But Glen was a veteran film editor and second-unit director. He had lots of experience working in both TV and films. Glen’s IMDB.com entry includes a directing credit for the TV series Man in a Suitcase.
Who is/are Waller-Bridge’s co-writer/co-writers? The Mail doesn’t bother to say. Eon’s Barbara Broccoli said in September 2022 that veteran 007 film scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade will be summoned, yet again, to toil on Bond 26. But the Mail glosses over this.
How hard is it to direct a Bond movie? It’s really hard. Months of pre-productions. Months of filming. Months of editing and post-production. It’s as much directing an army as a film.
Got it. Easy peasy.
Lewis Gilbert was a veteran movie director when he accepted the job of directing You Only Live Twice in the 1960s. Gilbert was overwhelmed. So we’re going to have someone with no directing experience take on a job that has gotten even more complicated a half-century later.
While we’re at it, directors such as Josh Trank and Chloe Zhao stumbled when they took on huge films based on comic books. Zhao won an Oscar for directing Nomadland. Her efforts for directing Marvel’s The Eternals didn’t work out so well. The less said about Trank’s 2015 Fantastic Four movie, the better.
“This is an old friend of mine. And it tells me something smells.”
UPDATE (April 4): The byline on last weekend’s Mail story was Caroline Graham, a Los Angeles-based scribe. Graham co-wrote a November 2014 story for the Mail that said Christoph Waltz would play Blofeld in SPECTRE.
James Bond became BIG in the United States in the early 1960s.
Ian Fleming’s 007 novels had been published since the early 1950s. But Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner began serializing Bond short stories and novels in the early 1960s. And, of course, John F. Kennedy, elected as U.S. president in 1960, made it known he was a 007 fan.
Life magazine published a list of the new president’s favorite books. Most were heavy history and biographies. But one was a popular tale, Fleming’s From Russia, With Love novel.
Hefner and Kennedy provided the literary Bond a huge jolt in the U.S. All of this happened just as the literary Bond was to be adapted to the screen by Eon Productions and United Artists.
That era, perhaps, might be at an end.
These days, continuation novels featuring Fleming’s character don’t show up in the U.S. until months after they’ve been published in the U.K. The most recent example? Double Or Nothing by Kim Sherwood. The most interested U.S. Bond literary fans arranged to have the novel imported.
What’s more, the U.S. box office for the 007 films aren’t what they used they be.
With 2021’s No Time to Die, the 25th James Bond film made by Eon, showed up in the pay-per-view market about a month after the U.S. debut. In the U.S. theatrical market, No Time to Die came in at 007 at $160.8 million, behind The Eternals at $164.6 million, a major disappointment for Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel Studios.
What’s up with Bond 26, the next installment for the Eon series?
Nobody outside of Eon knows. As of this date, there’s no new Bond film actor. There’s no new Bond film director. There’s no new Bond script.
Eventually, you would guess, Bond 26 will take shape. But Bond doesn’t generate the excitement in the U.S. it once did. The U.K. is Bond’s homeland. Both the film and literary franchises care a lot about that.
The U.S.? It doesn’t seem so much.
JFK died 60 years ago this November. Hefner? He left the scene in September 2017.
We will see if Bond again generates the kind of excitement he once did in the U.S.
Nature abhors a vacuum. With that in mind, here are some modest questions concerning Bond 26.
Time to lighten up? Over the past five Bond films made by Eon Productions there has been a lot of angst.
Bond losing his lady love (Casino Royale, based on Ian Fleming’s first novel). Bond out for revenge (Quantum of Solace). Bond not able to save M (Skyfall). Bond discovers his foster brother was his greatest enemy (SPECTRE). Bond getting blown up with missiles (No Time to Die).
The Daniel Craig era of Bond films (which started over from the previous 20 movies) was often very serious. That era was a big difference from the mostly escapist Eon adventures that preceded it. Should the past be the future?
Could it be time to lighten things up?
Time to reduce the budget? The Bond film series has a history of hiking production budgets and bringing them back under control.
With SPECTRE and No Time to Die, the production budgets exploded. U.K. regulatory filings in 2020 suggested No Time to Die’s budget was nearing $300 million. That doesn’t include marketing costs. Is this sustainable? Sure, delays related COVID-19 were a factor. But the film industry has, more or less, adjusted to all that.
Time to let go of the homages to past Bond movies? Quantum of Solace, SPECTRE, and No Time to Die all had homages (critics would say crutches) to previous Bond films.
No Time to Die alone had multiples homages to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. At one point, Bond is meeting with M in London with John Barry’s theme from Majesty’s plays in the background. There are multiple references to the John Barry-Hal David song We Have All the Time in the World. And, of course, we get the Aston DB5 (in the form of newly built replica cars).
Screenplay credits in movies can be elaborate and that was certainly the case with 2021’s No Time to Die. Four people got a piece of the credit, including actress and scribe Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
As you may recall, Waller-Bridge’s participation caused quite a bit of fuss. Among the many articles written was a September 2019 Daily Mail article by Baz Bamigboye. That piece quoted an executive the scribe didn’t identify as saying, “Phoebe’s contribution was great — far greater than we’d anticipated. She’s the savior of Bond, really. She was across the entire script.” (Bamigboye now works for the Deadline entertainment website.)
Eventually, the writing team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade as well as director Cary Fukunaga received the screenplay credit with Waller-Bridge. Purvis, Wade and Fukunage were credited with the plot.
Now, a new Daily Mail story quotes Waller-Bridge that she maybe wasn’t the savior after all.
But she admits to being underprepared after signing up for the project, resulting in many of her early suggestions being dismissed by producers of the long-running franchise.
‘I should naturally have done a lot of Bond research… I didn’t do a huge amount of research for it,’ she told Masterclass acting scheme students during a recent talk at London’s Haymarket Theatre.
‘I’m not very good at homework. That says a lot.’
According to the article, Waller-Bridge said, “It is fun playing in someone else’s sandpit for a while as you learn stuff.” She also said she hadn’t been told the movie would end with Daniel Craig’s version of James Bond being killed. That had already been baked into the story
Of course, Waller-Bridge wasn’t the only writer whose work was hyped. The Playlist in a February 2019 story proclaimed Scott Z. Burns had been retained to “overhaul” No Time to Die’s script. Burns has a reputation as a script doctor and probably was well paid. In the end, his name wasn’t included in the screenplay credit.
March 4 is the third anniversary of a No Time to Die event, the first time the 25th James Bond film made by Eon Productions, was delayed because of COVID-19.
Context: COVID-19 was spreading across the globe, causing major health problems.
No Time to Die had already been delayed multiple times, from fall 2019 to April 2020 because the original director, Danny Boyle, had departed the project.
Now, a virus was going to have an impact. At the time, there was no vaccine. People were dying.
Here is one social media form of the announcement:
MGM, Universal and Bond producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, announced today that after careful consideration and thorough evaluation of the global theatrical marketplace, the release of NO TIME TO DIE will be postponed until November 2020. pic.twitter.com/a9h1RP5OKd
Two days before the announcement, MI6 HQ and the James Bond Dossier published an open letter urging the movie’s premiere be delayed because of COVID-19.
This caused a huge controversy in the Bond fan community. (Disclosure: I have been on MI6 HQ’s James Bond & Friends podcast and I have done some livestreams with the James Bond Dossier,) I know both were criticized after the open letter was published.
In the end, No Time to Die wouldn’t come out until the fall of 2021.
There may still be hard feelings about the open letter in the fan community. Still, it’s hard to believe three years have passed since the COVID-19 delays of No Time to Die.
A former image for the official James Bond feed on Twitter
It’s inevitable. After the Daniel Craig version of James Bond was killed in No Time to Die, the Bond character will return somehow at some time.
But how?
Some possibilities follow.
Eon starts over — again: In Craig’s debut as Bond, Eon Productions did a reboot. That is, the series started all over again.
Since No Time to Die, Craig has claimed it was always his intention that his version of Bond would die in the end. Whether true or not, that’s how Craig’s five-film tenure played out.
Here is an excerpt from a Craig interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“Two things, one for myself and one for the franchise,” Craig said. “One, for the franchise, was that resets start again, which [the franchise] did with me. And I was like, ‘Well, you need to reset again.’ So let’s kill my character off and go find another Bond and go find another story. Start at [age] 23, start at 25, start at 30.”
However, until Eon shows its cards, there are other possibilities.
The code name theory rears its head: The code name theory refers to a way to explain how different actors (Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, etc., etc.) portray a character named “James Bond” while each actually is different.
The one time this notion was used occurred in the 1967 Casino Royale spoof. There was one “real” James Bond (David Niven) with multiple agents being designated as “James Bond.”
Hard-core Bond fans mostly despise this idea. But there are general movie fans who argue it’s a wonderful idea. Until Bond 26 gets sorted out, you can expect more of this stuff.
In fact, the Screen Rant website already has come out with a version of this notion.
One potential option for Bond 26 is to continue directly from the ending of No Time To Die. MI6 would be in mourning over the loss of James Bond, but international villainy waits for no one, and a replacement must be found. This new “James Bond” would then be recruited to replace Daniel Craig’s version, with explicit references to how their predecessor died saving the world from Safin and the Heracles weapon. This scenario would help preserve a semblance of continuity between James Bond movies, and also allow EON to think outside its usual box when casting Daniel Craig’s replacement.
We pretend the Craig era never happened: Eon’s Bond series had a very loose continuity from 1962-2002. When Sean Connery first departed the series in 1967, Bernard Lee’s M, Lois Maxwell’s Moneypenny and Desmond Llewelyn’s Q remained. Connery came back in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever but Lee, Maxwell and Llewelyn remained.
Roger Moore came aboard in 1973, with Lee and Maxwell still present. Llewelyn came back as Q for Moore’s second outing in The Man With the Golden Gun.
With Bond 26, what happens with the Craig supporting cast? You could have Ralph Fiennes’ M, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny and Ben Wishaw’s Q without any mention of the Craig version of Bond.
Conceivably, you pick up with the incredibly loose continuity of the 1962-2002 movies. Let’s move on, chaps.
The Spy Command 