A new report has been spreading across the internet that the writing of the next James Bond film – the twenty-sixth in the franchise and one set to introduce a new actor in the role of the suave British secret agent – has run into a problem. Apparently, the writers can’t seem to figure out how to relaunch the character given how things ended in the last Bond film, No Time To Die.
RadarOnLine is reporting that according to a source “close to the production” –
Writers are tearing their hair out. Bond didn’t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death – he was blown to pieces on screen. Everyone agrees it was a massive mistake because Bond is supposed to be eternal. They are now stuck trying to find a believable way to resurrect him, and it is proving almost impossible.
This has, of course, led to a flurry of discussion on some social media platforms with some people expressing disbelief about the entire state of affairs.
And in the long line of dumb online movie controversies, this is definitely one of the dumber.
But let’s take a step back and see how we got here.
The Bond franchise was launched in 1962 with the release of Dr. No, an adaptation of a spy novel by writer Ian Fleming. Fleming was already having a degree of success with the Bond character, having published seven novels and a short story collection at the time of Dr. No’s release. Film producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli would cast the virtual unknown Sean Connery in the role of Fleming’s spy, and James Bond-mania exploded almost overnight. The public couldn’t get enough and Eon Productions found themselves in the James Bond business full time, creating a film franchise that has lasted over half a century.
When Amazon bought MGM studios in 2022, the purchase included the rights to the franchise from Eon Productions. Three years later, Broccoli’s two children – Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who had controlled Eon following their father’s death in 1996 – bowed out, leaving Amazon to hire Amy Pascal and David Heyman to oversee the franchise going forth.
But the alleged problem stems from how the last Bond film ended. 2022’s No Time To Die was the fifth and final film to star Daniel Craig as James Bond. He first took on the role in 2006’s Casino Royale, and his tenure as the character is marked by a grittier realism and a deeper exploration of Bond’s character than had ever been attempted before. Across five films we see Bond struggle with the morality of his work and his past. Finally, in No Time To Die, Bond sacrifices himself in order to save the lives of his former lover and the child he only recently discovered he had. Here ended the story of Daniel Craig’s Bond. And that seems to have thrown some folks into a tizzy.
Now the James Bond franchise is not like the Marvel Cinematic Universe in that it does not necessarily need to be beholden to a specific, unfolding continuity. In fact, it can easily be argued that until Craig took on the role in Casino Royale, it was never much of a concern at all to either the producers or the public. Sure, after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service there would be an occasional mention of Bond’s murdered wife of a few hours, Tracy. But it was never in a way that actually seemed to have real impact or drove the narrative of Bond’s adventures forward.
When it came time for a new actor to slip into Bond’s tuxedo, the series would just continue along as if nothing changed. No one commented in 1973’s Live And Let Die that Bond suddenly looked different and a whole lot like that TV actor Roger Moore. If anything, given the shifts in tone as each actor approaches the role in their own fashion, it seems fairly reasonable to suggest that each Bond actors’ films were only canonical to themselves and every new actor was a soft reboot of the series.
(Also, for the sake of this discussion, we are going to set aside the fan theory that “James Bond” is really an assigned alias that is passed from agent to agent. There is plenty of interior evidence in the run of pre-Daniel Craig films that this is not the case. Besides, the idea originated as a joke in the 1967, very much non-canonical Casino Royale film which starred David Niven, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress all playing a character that goes by the name of “James Bond” at one point or another.)
What is absolutely frustrating is that it was pretty obvious from the get-go that the Daniel Craig-era was going to be its own thing. Tonally, the series was never as mature, and Craig seemed interested in exploring the character with more of an actor’s approach than had been seen before. (No offense to the Bonds who preceded Craig.) The first minutes of Casino Royale before the title sequence show us Bond earning his license to kill. It could not be any more apparent that this was a hard reboot of the franchise. And given that, it should never have been much of a surprise that this era would have a definitive ending either.
It’s not like film franchises have done soft reboots or just flat-out ignored the events of previous installments before. Every Highlander movie after the second one has (rightfully so) ignored that film. Toho Studios has done a couple of soft reboots of their Godzilla franchise, starting a new string of films that only recognize the events of the 1954 original film and nothing else. Has anyone only familiar with Michael Keaton’s two turns as Batman been left scratching their head when confronted by Christian Bale’s trilogy? And let’s not even try to untangle the number of times the Halloween franchise has decided to pretend that previous installments never happened.
And you know what? Audiences figured things out just fine. There was no large-scale confusion any other time filmmakers fiddled with what had come before in a franchise, and trust me, James Bond fans will be just fine jumping into a new actor’s interpretation of the character and his adventures without any reference to Craig and his exploits. Hell, No Time To Die‘s credits even ended with the classic note “James Bond Will Return.” To think the general audience would somehow be confused by a reboot of the franchise with a new Bond and a new story to tell in this day and age is frankly insulting.
Look, I understand that not everyone was thrilled with the Craig-era of the franchise, even before the ending of No Time To Die. An that’s fine. There are different Bonds for different tastes. It is arguably how the franchise has managed to continue for so long. The more tongue-in-cheek style of a majority of the Roger Moore Bond films is not my particular cup of tea. And the finale of the Craig-era I saw as a fairly logical conclusion to the James Bond story that started all the way back in Casino Royale. Now it is time to tell a new story.
The thing some fans seem to be complaining about is the exact thing that they should be embracing. The Craig iteration of Bond is done and over. Now is the time for a new version, one that looks at the character in a new way, going forward into the second quarter of the twenty-first century. And there is no need to have it somehow connect to make a larger, and much longer, sixty year story. Does this new James Bond need a new, Casino Royale-like origin story? Maybe. Maybe not. Should we the audience just meet this new James Bond in media res as it were, just him going out on one of a long string of his missions? That seems like a still viable option.
There are lots of things for the creators on this new James Bond film to figure out. But thinking they need a way to explain how he could be resurrected from a death we saw in a previous version of his adventures isn’t one of them.
