Bond 25 questions: The marketing & box office edition

No Time to Die logo

We’re a month away from No Time to Die being released in the U.K. It appears the 25th James Bond film is done with delays and ready to confront the COVID-19 pandemic head on. Naturally, the blog has questions.

What’s the movie’s global box office going to be?

In the pandemic era, the movie with the largest global box office total is F9: The Fast Saga at about $704 million. Can No Time to Die match or exceed that? Naturally, Bond fans think so. But box office totals depend on more than hard-core fans.

What are the marketing dynamics?

To begin with, it’s a three-headed monster.

–You have Eon Productions, which makes the movies. Eon’s Michael G. Wilson said in 2015 that the company really manages the marketing. The distributors just execute Eon’s plan.

“We create it, they execute it,” Wilson said at that time.

–You have Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Bond’s home studio, which foots the bills. No Time to Die is being distributed in North America by United Artists Releasing, a joint venture of MGM and Annapurna Pictures.

–You have Universal, which is distributing the film internationally. Supposedly, Universal was selected because of its track record, which included turning The Fast and the Furious series into a $1 billion per film juggernaut per film prior to COVID-19. In that case, Universal ran the whole show. Now it’s dealing with another studio and a strong-willed production company.

On Aug. 24, Vulture, the arts website of New York magazine, had a story about the difficulty in scheduling movies amid COVID-19. It quoted someone it identified only as ” a person with knowledge of business practices at Eon.

“They’ve lost so much money by moving [No Time to Die]; the marketing has gotten stale,” this person says. “The Broccolis care more about the U.K. than anything — making it a big hit in the U.K., a decent hit in the U.S. and the rest of the world.” (emphasis added)

If true, it’d be interesting to know what MGM/United Artists Releasing thinks about that. It’d also be interesting to get the view of Universal, responsible for a lot more than just the U.K.

Anything to be on the lookout for?

The marketing is gearing up. Some commercials have run recently. Assuming there isn’t another delay (there have been five to date), we’ll be getting to judge the marketing efforts for ourselves.

Mad magazine may be shutting down

Part of the Mort Drucker-drawn parody of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service from the 1970s

Mad magazine, the humor publication that debuted in 1952, may be shutting down later this year.

David DeGrand, a writer and artist for Mad, said Wednesday night via Twitter he could “confirm” the upcoming end of publication.

Another cartoonist, Evan Dorkin, also took to social media to talk about Mad.

“Goodbye, MAD Magazine,” Dorkin wrote in a separate post on Twitter. “As a youngster I was a huge fan of the 70’s era, as a young adult I rediscovered the 50’s comics, as an old nerd I somehow became a contributor…Getting the e-mail today was crushing.”

Neither Mad nor DC Comics had made an announcement Wednesday night. Both Mad and DC are part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit that also includes Warner Bros.

The Vulture blog of New York magazine said it obtained an email sent to freelancers by DC saying issue 10 of Mad will be the last one with original content. Mad will reuse features until subscription obligations are complete, Vulture said.

Mad had published 550 issues from 1952 to 2018. It went back to No. 1 in 2018.

The publication began as a comic book. It switched to a magazine format in 1955.

Over the decades, Mad published many parodies of James Bond and other spies.

They included “007” (April 1965 issue), showing what a stage musical featuring “James Bomb” would be like. The villainous organization ICECUBE is towing the U.K. to the North Pole. The head of the organization is revealed to be Mike Hammer, angry that Bomb had taken away his book sales.

The parody, drawn by Mort Drucker and written by Frank Jacobs, included songs were all sung to the tune of songs from Oklahoma! For example: “Poor Bond Is Dead,” instead of “Poor Jud Is Dead.”

The March 1974 issue of Mad that parodied the first eight movies in the 007 series produced by Eon Productions. The parody titles were Dr. No-No, From Russia With Lunacy, Goldfingerbowl, Thunderblahh, You Only Live Nice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Shamus, Dollars Are Forever and Live And Let Suffer. Mad later parodied other Bond films.

Mad in the 1960s also did parodies of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (which included Sean Connery’s Bond as a henchman), Mission: Impossible, I Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

UPDATE (12:45 p.m., July 4): Tom Richmond, another Mad artist, confirms everything in a detailed post on his website. An excerpt:

I could go on and on about the end of an era and a true American original, about how MAD had an incalculable influence on satire, comedy in general, and the humor of the entire planet, how its pages regularly featured some of the greatest cartoonists who ever lived like (Harvey) Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Wally Wood, Will Elder, Al Jaffee, Sergio Aragones, Don Martin, Paul Coker… too many to list really. I could go on and on but all that is meaningless with respect to today. None of that history can be taken away, and none of it is a reason for the next issue to come out. In the end in this day and age, the only reason anything is allowed to exist comes down to money. If something is profitable, it continues. If it is not, it ends.

MAD is ending for the same reason anything ends… it’s all about the Benjamins.

Richmond writes that the company still owns all that artwork he cited. That’s still valuable content for future reprints and collections. Essentially, the company really doesn’t need new material the way Mad is selling.

Craig’s post-007 career looking promising, Vulture says

Daniel Craig and Aston Martin DB5 in a Skyfall publicity sill

Daniel Craig is setting himself up for a good post-007 career, whenever that may be, the Vulture entertainment news blog says.

The article, by Kevin Lincoln, is more an analysis than a news story. The blog, part of New York magazine, says three projects comprise “a solid triptych of projects that might begin to usher Craig into the next wave of his career, should he decide to give up martinis and gunplay for good.”

The three are Logan Lucky, a heist movie that was in production this fall; Purity, the 20-episode limited TV series on Showtime set for production in 2017; and Kings, a drama about the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Kings is listed as in development at IMDB.com, with information only available on the professional part of the website. The Deadline: Hollywood entertainment website reported this summer that Craig was in early talks about the project.

Vulture also argues that Craig is benefiting from the rise of comic book-based films.

“With that shift also came an expectation that most major, and even serious, actors would also have their own franchise, making Bond likely less of an albatross for Craig than it might’ve been for his predecessors, who worked in eras when those types of ongoing character obligations weren’t nearly as common,” Lincoln wrote.

Just when Craig’s post-Bond career will start isn’t known. The 48-year-old actor said earlier this month in New York that no decisions have been made about Bond 25, although he said he’d miss the Bond role.

“There’s no conversation going on because genuinely everybody’s just a bit tired,” Craig said at The New Yorker Festival on Oct. 7.

Also, the 007 franchise is in a bit of a hiatus. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which isn’t big enough to release its own films, hasn’t yet struck a deal with another studio to distribute future Bond movies. Sony Pictures has released all four Craig 007 movies but its most recent deal expired with 2015’s SPECTRE.

To read the entire Vulture analysis, CLICK HERE.