For years the biggest perceived threat to the future of 007 was the apocryphal “woke police”. The imagined scene was thus: a mob of rainbow-haired bisexuals would turn Bond into a woman, vodka martinis into vegan wine, and Q into, I don’t know, LGBTQ+ or something. Shock horror, this hasn’t – and never would have – come to pass. Instead what will likely kill off Bond is something all the more predictable in 2025: a slow, sad corporate takeover, men in suits trampling all over cinema’s most famous man in a suit.
In news that sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and 007 fandom on Thursday, long-time custodians of the franchise Eon announced they had ceded creative control of Bond to Amazon, following months of speculation about the future of the series. In 2021, Amazon bought MGM, which shares the Bond rights with Eon, in an $8.5bn deal, and had apparently grown frustrated with Eon’s slow movement on 007’s next chapter. Daniel Craig announced his Bond exit in 2017 and his final film – No Time to Die – was released in 2021, yet there’s been no significant movement on a new movie since. No script has been written, no director has been set, and – most significantly – there is no new Bond himself. According to reports, Eon has only had the briefest of meetings with a handful of actors over the years to discuss taking over the role.
From a business perspective, you can understand some of Amazon’s frustration over sitting idly on a billion-dollar money-maker. But Eon were reportedly skittish about the company’s plans for the franchise – which included spin-offs and TV series – and disliked those in power there. A December report in the Wall Street Journal claimed that Barbara Broccoli – co-head of Eon and the daughter of original Bond producer “Cubby” Broccoli – had privately dubbed them “f****** idiots”. Both companies were at a stalemate, and now Eon has given in. (Amazon MGM Studios, Broccoli and her Eon co-head Michael G Wilson will remain co-owners of the franchise, with the Bond intellectual property rights housed under the same umbrella.)
A dire indication of where Bond might be headed came mere minutes after the news broke, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – the world’s Blofeld, you might say – posting on his social media channels, “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?” It was unclear if Bezos was indeed attempting to crowdsource his new leading man from his X followers.
What this will officially mean for the future of Bond is unclear, but there’s undeniably a sense of great loss to all of this: 007 has been in Broccoli hands since its cinematic conception, and for all the inconsistency of quality that has plagued the Bond films, they’ve rarely been total disasters. Smart casting and decent stunts have always managed to paper over the cracks and invisible cars along the way, and that comes from the top: producers who know these movies in their bones, where they’ve been and where they’re going.
One of Amazon’s biggest complaints about Eon, at least according to that Wall Street Journal report, was their aversion to risk, and how uncomfortable they were with the idea of mining the 007 property for all its worth (it was a “death knell”, the report claimed, when an Amazon executive referred to the franchise as “content” during a meeting with Barbara Broccoli). But this has actually been a very good thing, Eon rarely sullying the Bond brand over the past 60 years. Flash-in-the-pan spin-off ideas have never historically got off the ground (Halle Berry Bond Girl movie, we hardly knew ye), the 007 video games and novels have been largely thoughtful and inventive, and Bond merchandising deals have always bent to the aspirational rather than the throwaway – Aston Martins and Omega watches, yes; Spectre-themed toys with your Happy Meal, not so much. Before Amazon, the closest thing to a real Bond spin-off was a short-lived animated series about a young Bond at prep school, and that only lasted 65 episodes in 1991.
It’s meant that the James Bond franchise has retained an air of specialness – a new movie is an event, a once-every-few-years spectacle that feels as if it’s been put together with care, with premieres that the royal family show up for. There have been seven men who’ve played the character, all unique in their own way and each the definitive one for at least a proportion of the Bond fanbase (mine’s Brosnan – who’s yours?). Now with the franchise under the cloak of Amazon, there is every chance this kind of conversation around 007 will cease entirely – there will be a 007 in the new movies, likely a young 007, then different spin-off series each with an agent bearing the 007 codename. Plus the reality shows, kickstarted by that bizarre Brian Cox-fronted 007: Road to a Million game show in 2023. It’ll be death by a thousand Bonds, each to be scrolled through on your Prime Video landing page.
And care to imagine what this will mean for Ian Fleming’s most famous creation as a whole? Look no further than Star Wars, which has transformed from a relatively infrequent and distinct series of films into an exhausting and exhausted content mine in the space of less than 10 years. Dozens of spin-off movies have been mooted. TV series have come and gone. Fans have largely revolted. Since the launch of the streaming platform Disney+ in November 2019, there have been seven live-action Star Wars TV shows, released with such (largely anonymous) consistency that you may not even have realised some of them exist. Did you know that there was a Star Wars series with Jude Law that ended its first season just last month?
This, depressingly, is set to be the future of Bond – a once great series of films diluted into a soup of algorithmic nothingness. Come 2026, we’ll be begging for the days when the biggest worry about 007 was whether he’ll still be allowed to flirt.
