The last James Bond movie took a step that no previous film had made before when it actually went and killed off Daniel Craig’s Bond. It raises some potentially interesting questions regarding where the franchise will go from here, but director Martin Campbell, who has reinvented Bond not once but twice, says the simple fact that we know the franchise will continue means Bond’s death isn’t that big a deal.
While the Vegas odds on the next James Bond seem to be changing regularly if you’re going to put money down on who will direct the next installment of the James Bond franchise, you may want to bet on Martin Campbell, who directed the first installments for both Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. If he does happen to direct the next James Bond film and launches the franchise for a new actor, he tells Express that Craig’s on-screen death is not an issue. Because the next movie will simply ignore it and move on and nobody is going to care. He explained…
To be honest, it was fine for me. He gets killed off, which is fine because when they do the next Bond, they’ll completely ignore the fact that he was killed off and Bond will keep going. It’s so simple. There’s no explanation required is there? Daniel Craig was Bond and now the next guy is alive. They’re not going to have a problem with that.
Campbell is almost certainly correct. The James Bond franchise has been going on for so long, with so many different actors playing the lead role, that audiences are almost certainly not going to have an issue with just seeing one more. The fact that the character died previously shouldn’t be much of a stumbling block. Daniel Craig’s version of the character was also given a basic origin story as well, something we hadn’t seen previously, so his bond was seemingly always designed to be its own thing.
The next Bond could certainly get his own origin movie to help separate things from the Craig years, making it clear this is a new character, but I’m not sure even that is particularly necessary. If they decide to hit the ground running with a new James Bond adventure that assumes audiences are familiar with the character, there’s no reason anybody should balk at it, because audiences are absolutely familiar with the character. It may seem weird if you sit down to watch the James Bond movies in order, for Bond to die and then simply be alive again with no explanation, but if the movie is good, people will not care much.
We’re still waiting for the news regarding who the new James Bond will be. While it seems all but certain James Bond will remain a man, the character could still undergo a lot of other changes depending on who is chosen. Every day is one step closer to that announcement
