Where is James Bond? Trapped in an ugly stalemate with Amazon
wsj.com
wsj.com
"No Mr. Bond, I expect you to provide me a formulaic plot to provide my algorithm another hook to drive up my streaming market share!"
Though maybe the real plot is to irradiate the world's limited supply of James Bond properties, driving up the value of the only ones that remain?
They could call it Family Bond.
They could call it Gold Bond.
I.e. "Sure, you have/are ____, but we're ____. We're the real big deal."
I know Google was essentially laughed out of a Maps partnership inside a major warehouse retailer because Google refused to consider sharing the collected data with the retailer. "You wouldn't know what to do with it" was a direct quote.
It feels like legacy Hollywood, for all its faults, understood how to square ego circles better to get deals done.
I don't know much about this "tech culture", but are you sure that they really have this sense of entitlement? Couldn't it rather be that these "tech people" are simply less experienced in "deal politics" and bootlicking important stake holders?
What is it then?
This is entirely achievable, as both parties have different goals. What has value to one, may be meaningless to another. I've brokered deals where I gave nothing I cared about, yet that same point was of immense value to the other party.
Yet when you simply wave away the other's requests, that's madness. In the example given, what is the cost for Google sharing data from maps? Almost nothing. It has value, but the cost of cloning that data is absolutely minimal. The legal agreements and NDAs for that data are more expensive than any other aspect of the agreement.
And if that data has no value to the client, but they think they want it, even better! Now you're giving them something they don't really need, that you don't have a cost in giving, and it's now a bargaining chip with an innate value! Beautiful, absolutely beautiful!
I can even picture a scenario a month or two down the line. The client is baffled a bit by the API, what they receive. Now you consult for them, in an additional arrangement, and provide better integration, etc.
Instead of shutting them down (you wouldn't know what to do with it), you sell it to them as they wish, then teach them what to do with it! What an awesome business opportunity!
And of course during that arrangement, you may fine more revenue streams. And ones that, indeed, help the client even more!
Never shutdown a client like that.
Of course, the story could be exaggerated, or mistold.
When someone new comes and works for me or for anyone at my company they better be “bootlicking” higher ups and doing what they ask or they won’t last.
IMHO, this one line summarizes remarkably well why Hollywood wrecks fictional universes: Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Fantastic Beasts, DC Universe, and even parts of the Marvel universe.
I see the absence of an auteur capable of respecting themselves and therefore their audience as the root cause of clichéd moves such as "war is bad so let Wonder Woman kill the God Of War". Clearly, the person making such a decision simply does not have a reputation to uphold; what remains is optimizing ticket sales, one movie at a time.
Giving the character a break after the Daniel Craig era is a calculated business move, and a good one. They'll wait for public interest to drum up again in a couple of years and then magically resolve all their differences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Saltzman
[2] <https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/29/obituaries/harry-saltzman...> <https://archive.is/ji1iT>
The Bond franchise it a remarkable thing, but I don't know how you make it "fresh" without ruining the charm. The Craig years were a soft reboot -- Bond was a freshly promoted 00 in _Casino_, and was thus explicitly not the same guy who bested Dr Julius No.
I just don't know where they go from here that would be interesting, and I 100% do not trust Amazon to treat the property well AT ALL.
Yes. Would Hollywood please kill off Bond, Star Trek, and Dune? They're all 1960s products that are way past their sell-by date.
I'm a little confused about your ire about Dune. Prior to the recent films, those novels never had a decent adaptation -- Lynch's film in 1984, and then a really terrible TV attempt by SciFi like 25 years ago. They're hugely influential in SF, so taking another bite at the apple seems reasonable to me.
My understanding is that Villeneuve is in fact doing a film based on _Dune Messiah_ as a third film, but I don't know if he'll go farther than that. The books get increasingly goofy, so that would be a reasonable stopping point; nobody wants a 3 hour film about a giant human/worm hybrid who rules for 2,000 years or whatever.
The TV show is its own work. I have no judgement on it at all, but its success or failure doesn't affect my opinion of the films.
It's definitely time to let it go. Nobody is clamouring for "Bulldog Drummond" or "Biggles" any more and Bond lived longer than either of those.
(although I still have the Corgi Aston Martin on my desk as a plaything)
I think what they did with Top Gun was pretty good - it's still kinda about Maverick but set it up so the universe expands a bit. The po faced Craig films just got boring. I will re-watch the Moore films occasionally for the goofy nostalgia but I can't even remember the names of half the Craig movies.
I like that. Probably all that's needed to explain the stalemate.
Apple on the other hand are making some surprisingly good shows! Not always, but generally much better than Amazon.
That seems like the entire streaming ecosystem as services compete to pay more for content than it is worth and ultimately many lose money…. And the content is hidden / hard to find.
It would be a very different "Bond".
While some of what Amazon has made is terrible, much is good. They produce so much that the average quality is pretty close to the global average, so I find predictions challenging.
Personally I think it completely depends on the story and artistic direction. Wolf Hall (casting mostly reflects historical appearances of characters portrayed) can exist next to Bridgerton (explicitly colour-blind casting). Both have their merits.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/18/chanel-stewart-...
This isn’t an H1B Visa holder rant. It’s an indictment to the program that keeps them beholden to a company.
FWIW: I’m Black and I found some of the things that were suppose to trigger me or some of the “green washing” that were suppose to give me a warm and fuzzy eye rolling.
To be clear, I had a customer facing role (AWS Professional Services). Amazon wasn’t about to send anyone incompetent to talk to their large clients I don’t care what kind of initiatives they had.
Perhaps I'm a little bit too rebellious to be a culture fit for the movie industry, but if this is the case, I would be very encouraged to create an a show that is outstanding, but violates the DEI criteria of the award, so that the awards become a target of ridiculation for not including "my" show because of stupid DEI criteria.
They also criticized Disney for having a Black Captain America in the movies even though it was clear to any Marvel comics fans that this was always going to be the case.
There’s an entire subgenre of YouTube channels that consist solely of creators updating videos promising that they have inside information on the creative conflicts at Lucasfilm/Amazon/etc, all of which happen to align perfectly with whatever the fandom is outraged with that week.
https://youtube.com/@mikezeroh
This guys channel is a great example - most of the channels discussing “female custodes Henry cavil warhammer 40k tv series” Amazon follow a similar format.
Edit:
I’d also add that I don’t think Rings of Power is bad because they cast minorities - most of the actors are fine, really. The plotting and pacing is just horrendous. In a show that has 5+ active plot lines and threads scattered all over the world, they’ve spent a quarter of their screen time on a plot line that’s completely disconnected not just from the lore but from the wider story being told and doesn’t look like it’s going to connect anytime soon. Which is funny, because I’d imagine Amazon execs felt that they were obligated to include that plot line (the Hobbit one) to appease viewers.
Although the Sovjets are the bad guys again...
After we watched it "Who was the genius that picked Daniel Craig?"
Now I miss him. Often thinking if Tom cruise could do so many MI, I am sure Daniel Craig could do just one more Bond.
Start a tradition where previous Bond actor gets one turn as a baddie.
The books are uneven, IMHO, but "Casino Royale", the first of Fleming's novels — written well before the "Dr. No" film — is enjoyable and will give you a very different Bond from what you are used to. Insecure, self-doubting, no "gadgets".... "Diamonds Are Forever" was perhaps my favorite of the books though.
(The film "Goldfinger" actually improved upon the plot of the original book in my opinion — in the book Goldfinger actually tries to steal the gold from Fort Knox.)
The exception obviously is the _Casino Royale_ with Daniel Craig, which most fans view as one of the best Bond films. I've forgotten the specifics, but that book was unavailable to Eon for decades due to some copyright and licensing shenanigans.
Some info on the copyright issues here [1].
Entertainment is full of brooding losers - thats not what the fans want.
That being said, it was still better than Wheel of Time. I’d argue that LotR was watchable, where as WoT was absolutely not!
Eh. Probably don't trust ragebait TV.
YouTube optimizes for clicks and eyeball time, not honest considered takes.
Do you like character development that rises above B-grade movie tropes?
Do you find blunt multicultural recasting for the sake of awkward forced multicultural injection, shock value, virtue signalling annoying?
Do you like epic battles between empires fought between more than 10 people?
Do you like timelines to be somewhat realistic?
I will say I agree that the last episode of S1 is my least favorite, but, they had a lot stacked against them and had to rewrite the final two due to Mat's actor not coming back after covid forced a filming break. That set off a chain reaction with a lot of far reaching consequences.
I liked S2 more than S1. Quality went up on basically every metric for me, though the finale still wasn't as epic as I would have hoped for... but is probably about all you can hope for without a LOTR-like budget. If they somehow make it to Dumai's Wells, hopefully they have more money then.
And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.
It's a 14.5 book series where the books average 600+ pages. Any adaptation is going to have to make massive changes, at least if they're filming it with real people. They also got dealt a raw hand with covid resulting in all sorts of set limitations and Mat's actor just... not returning after they filmed the first 6 episodes.
No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.
Relevant:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/WoTshow/comments/154r20d/barney_har...
1. Some people just don't like adaptations, and they need to understand what different mediums limit in terms of story telling. If you think of WoT as being 10,000 pages of content, and how you would shorten that to make it finish-able within a single human lifetime, then they have to change some things. But I gotta say, I think they capture a lot of the good of the books within the show.
2. Most people just have a picture in their head of what the thing is going to look like, and when that picture doesn't match up to what's made they're unhappy. And they don't understand why they couldn't just do the thing in their head because they don't understand the limitations of the medium.
2a. I think a thing that's important to a lot of people is the characters looking like the characters they imagine, and when casting is more diverse than that, people have a pretty negative reaction to the characters not "looking" like the characters. I think this ends up being more true the further from the description people feel like the characters are. ^This is a thing that has been hurting LoTR for a lot of people, in my opinion. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect.
I've also learned that some people just... didn't read the books all that closely, either. Or at least not character descriptions. Two Rivers people are described as being dark eyed and dark haired with fairly dark complexions - probably mediterranean - but people seemed to think they were supposed to look like they were from England, forgetting that Elaida explicitly mentions Rand is too fair skinned in EoTW. Or everyone outraged about Moraine/Siuan, apparently not understanding what RJ meant when he said they were "pillowfriends," despite lots of other fairly explicit hints at what the phrase meant.
It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.
In my opinion, If you are going to use an existing franchise with a built-in audience attached to it, you should feel obligated to honor the audience's vision for the franchise. If you have dramatically different visions then you should be creating original content.
The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described." I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean".
The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
> The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist. Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.
I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes.
As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail.
The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.
In Twilight, the main character is not actually described very well. There's an old comic from the oatmeal [1] about how the main character should be named "pants", because they're made just so that every reader can slip into the place and pretend like they're the main character.
This is a lot more common in books than I think you may realize. So when characters don't match expectations, it's because people are saying that characters don't look like them... which is, like, accidentally racism. To be clear, I don't think people are doing this maliciously. It's just that what you expect is not necessarily what you have to get.
You don't "pick" a diverse audience; you respect the audience/fandom how it currently is. I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
>which is, like, accidentally racism.
No it's not, it's people saying the character isn't as they expected them to be - and again that's on the person using the franchise to match what they are creating to that built-in audience FIRST and FOREMOST - if they don't want to respect that audience they shouldn't be touching the franchise they should be making something original.
> I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
Even if the consensus is wrong? Jesus wasn't white, and wouldn't be described as white, but everyone in the US 'fandom' thinks Jesus looks like them. Also, Jesus is frequently portrayed differently in different parts of the world.
I’m not an adaptation hater, I mourn the cancelation of the live action Cowboy Bebop, I loved it, despite that being an unpopular opinion. That being said…
There was a scene towards the end of season two, where the dark one was lobbing bad CGI fireballs at Egwene, and Moraine was down on the beach and launched a bad CGI dragon? to like even out the fight. And I could just feel the writers being completely lost there and just punting it over to the CGI department to figure it out…
(Spoilers for a 3 decade old series to follow, I suppose!)
But at the same time, as written, these fights were... kinda weird. For Falme, Mat blows the horn, and a fog covers everything and no one can really see what's going on except localized fights, and Rand's fight with Ishamael happens in the fog with swords, yet... everyone can also see his fight happening in the sky, apparently for hundreds of miles around where it happened? It's written almost like some sort of dream sequence.
And the Eye of the World fight is even stranger. Minimal explanation as Rand fights to wrest control of the Eye away from Aginor, but then Aginor tries to use too much of the power from the Eye, and it kills him? Then he Travels to Tarwin's Gap and pounds his fist on the ground and blows up a Trolloc/Mydraal army... and then climbs through a bunch of non-euclidean stairways in another dimension to end up in Ishamael's bedroom where he somehow cuts the link from Ishamael to the Dark One, which causes Ishamael to fly into the fireplace and get burned up. And then Rand faints and somehow ends up back on the ground where he was originally fighting with Aginor.
The first time I read either fight scene I don't think I could have explained exactly wtf was going on, particularly the end of Eye of the World. Later books revealed some of the power and magic being used and clarified them a bit, but at the same time, Jordan also retconned how some things worked later in the series, which also made them more confusing in other ways.
Thankfully most later fights of this nature are less fever dream-ish and more practical. There's just a whole lot of challenges with the show that make it quite difficult to adapt. I think a long-running animation might have been a medium that would have allowed for more flexibility, but the lack of realism would also hurt. Maybe someday AI stuff will be amazing and we'll be able to just generate hundreds of hours of premium television.
Bigger issues as other people pointed out are things like inventing weird bullshit storylines when you have 10k pages of content to draw from, or messing with the “hard rules” of the magic system, such as you can’t burn out in a circle, or heal someone from death.
But the village looked like like an HR training video. To contrast, a new season of squid game just came out. Everyone is Korean. Everyone speaks Korean. Everyone looks Korean.
This makes the show feel more real.
Or maybe you are hyper focused on specific, racial, details that you care about due to some internal biases?
But, the dialogue and storytelling were terrible. They invented new, pointless content. There's ~18k pages of source material. Amazon's job was to figure out how the hell to pair that down without compromising the original story. Instead, they went for visuals over storytelling
It's (and I say this as someone who sees themselves quite progressive) a bit too feminist.
It seems determined to make Nynaeve and Egwene the heroes of the show, the badasses on which everyone, including Rand, rely on. Not content with them already having access to the Power, and being among the strongest among the Aes Sedai, Amazon made them even more powerful and heroic than the books.
In contrast, in the books, Nynaeve and Egwene (it may be Elayne - in either case, two of these three) were actually rather "put out" by the fact that Rand was who he was and his access to the Power. Paraphrasing from the book:
"They were shocked, and not a little annoyed and upset. The Tower had told them that they were the strongest they'd seen with the Power in centuries, perhaps the strongest ever, and along comes Rand, barely able to control it himself, and yet even with them both fighting with all their might, he controlled both of them so... effortlessly... and then to say he wasn't even using a fraction of the Power he'd drawn before!"
I do give kudos to Amazon for respecting the diversity of the books, though.
He was initially excited to see "Superman" being involved, but now he also fears that this would turn to a shitshow.
Worse case it tanks, Amazon has yet another TV failure, and the fans continue to enjoy their mini-dolls and pretend-battles.
It's an abusive and expensive relationship. It's like an old school company that has no clue about inventory management, but they're in the 21st century now. They can have a million preorders for things which are mass produced from molds, and they can't manage to deliver them. Or books. Instead, any limited run ends up in the hands of scalpers.
Now they move into the entertainment industry. What are we to expect there? It's a notoriously difficult industry to operate in. They have to deal with Amazon and whoever is producing, but can they leave their hands off something long enough to let it get made? I have serious doubts.
They will meddle. I assume Amazon is negotiating to guarantee some level of control.
I think the best hope for any good content will continue to be fan create videos.
This push to "modernize" Bond is regressive once you realize male desire has not changed and thus there is nothing to modernize. Depictions of a cool spy dude getting beautiful women to fall for him is not "sexist" and not in need of modernization.
More generally the "modernization" angle is all about making the films which appeal to both men and women, which is a losing proposition for Bond which is fundamentally a franchise for men. You are always going to create a more compelling piece of content by tailoring it to a specific group, and the vast gulf in the sorts of content men and women tend to enjoy (generalization of course with many exceptions, but generally true nonetheless) means any bridge spanning that gap will be flimsy and weak.
Personally, I don't think Bond is bi.
The issues with Bond are that he’s uniformly portrayed by white men who are only portrayed sleeping and slapping women. Give us a Bond who sleeps and slaps men with the same abandon that he does women, and interest in Bond movies will go through the roof. And:
An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.
Did you watch the video? The flaps on the face had nothing to do with “sexuality”. It was Bond slapping women to get information out of them.
The nut smasher
> Mads Mikkelsen says 'Casino Royale' director told him and Daniel Craig to stop improvising during a nude torture scene
It turns out that the actors tried to advance the needle here, and make it into a psych torture and have it be more than just a basic rudimentary beating! But no, “it’s a Bond movie”, sigh, and so what could have been a deeply uncomfortable and memorable scene was neither.
Bond slapping people is about power and control fantasies. Bond was created at a time when women were finally wielding power of their own again in modern culture, and showed what was appealing to the men whose desires preceded the rise of women having power independent of men. Decades have passed since that moment in time, but Bond has remained fixed in stone, with only the barest concessions to reality, using women just as he always has - that is, needlessly different from how he uses men, without any cause other than stereotypes inherited from the 1950s.
The power fantasy of Bond is that Bond is a high-functioning sociopath, who has no problem using people for whatever meets their needs and then discarding them utterly. That power fantasy used to be the exclusive privilege of straight white men. That is no longer the case. Seeing all Bonds be straight white guys who only slap women is boring. That power fantasy is played out and dull and on its way out. I don't care if some Bonds are straight white dudebros, but it sure would be a lot more in character if they slapped everyone – and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them slept with non-women on screen — and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them weren't white.
Asking an intelligence agency to stop sending people to hit people for information is nonsensical. Only showing people reacting by providing the information is also nonsensical. There are quite enough people out there that would bust out laughing at that attempt, not to mention a few that would outright try to bite his hand off the next time he swung at them. I do respect that the mores of the time were afraid to show Bond actually punching a woman, but with all due respect, that was, rounding up, about a hundred years ago. Intelligence agencies have moved ahead with the times. Yes, I pointedly mean that Bond should be doing just as worse to the women as to the men, when it comes to getting information — whether that's slaps, punches, CBT, or buying them champagne and getting their shirt off.
There's a lot of us waiting in the wings to see the exact Bond power fantasy portrayed in that slapcut, by people that we can imagine ourselves being. Generic white guy #12 is not going to qualify, no matter how cool he is. (And let's face it: Foghorn Leghorn is a much better detective than Bond anyways.) Focusing on slapping is a distraction from the real problem: Bond was created, and has been maintained since, as a sociopathic power fantasy for straight white men alone. Until that broadens to represent that exact fantasy for others, I see little hope for the future of the franchise.
Don't change Bond-the-sociopath. Just remove the artificial restrictions on Bond's skin color and gender, and who he slaps, hits, flirts, and sleeps with.
There was a scene in The Americans where the husband and wife Soviet agents talked about / reminisced about their training. And that to the Soviets, sexuality was just another tool in the box. If you're seducing for the job, what does it matter? The husband was taught about seducing men, and the wife women, as much as the opposite sex (this is not an attempt to simplify / reduce sexuality, just how it is portrayed in the show).
Anyone tries to kill me, it's all good.
I worry sometimes we're headed for a situation where media and stories are almost whitewashed. There are some fandoms I'm into where fans go through past books and raise issues where "isn't this character being a bully here" and the answer is kind of... but they're also a kid at that point and kids do say mean things ... that's reality.
Bond is a holistic character. He’s whole life is a male fantasy. He’s suave , has an awesome job, cars, adventure, fights, etc. MI is just doubling down on the action and adventure part highlighting the physical capabilities of the main character. You don’t really care about his personality (perfect role for Tom Cruise imo)
In any case, I feel like it’s become normal to characterize all masculinity as toxic and statements like yours is kind of like the “people who say only bad guys worry about privacy” to put a HN tech spin on it. You allowing and excusing it in a way and I feel like it’s a slippery slope
For stating the most popular opinion on the internet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7oaZxdAMzI
What complaints did you have about the story?
Fallout turned out pretty good. I wish they wouldn't have cancelled The Expanse, it was a good show.
I don't understand how streaming services with huge budgets are so constantly bad when it comes to writing. I found the Amazon Lord of the Rings series just empty and I quit on it, something I couldn't imagine doing. The dialogue was simply dreadful to listen to.
How is it they so regularly skimp on the creative side of things and while they might have nice effects the content still seems so woefully unpolished/amateurish in other ways?
Initially, they're correlated and pointed in the same direction - do better work, get better pay.
At some point, they become orthogonal - they're just collecting a paycheck, the content has to exist but its content doesn't matter.
I do feel that there's a point beyond that at which they're inversely correlated: To navigate the power structures and economics at the top, you have to prioritize money and politics above art.
It's the same reason politics are broken: Local township boards can be just people who want to help their neighbors, at the middle levels in state and city posts you have to be good at fundraising and advertising but it's not all-consuming, but to win big races you have to be ruthless, because if you aren't, someone more ruthless than you will win.
And executive teams who are good at running a web service are not necessarily good at hiring creative production teams.
Netflix boss tells writers to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
“Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told [the author] a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)”
Sounds like all new productions reading this. We really live in idiocracy.
The Godzilla series Monarch (another show I quit on) was like that with the younger characters constantly just saying their motivation (and still inexplicably not keeping it straight, it changed randomly). But they never DO anything about it, they just use up all the time saying it. It made them seem very wishy washy / spineless dispite supposedly being adults.
Come to think of it the Lord of the Rings series has a lot time wasting repetition too...
This leads to their unwillingness to risk alienating anyone by making good creative decisions. Endless cycles of focus groups and executive committee notes will ensure that the finished produce has maximized appeal at the cost of being polished and professional, because all of those reworks leave little time to get it right, and anything good has to be done in secret without execs realizing it and fucking it up. Disney, their elder, is quite familiar with this problem:
https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-lilo-and-sti...
https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-th...
If you watch, for example, The Substance (2024) or Amélie (2001) or Hackers (1995), and then watch any modern generic Amazon/Netflix streaming movie, you can usually see the difference immediately. One is laser-focused on being the work of art it chooses to be, with no regard whatsoever for whether it attracts or repels any single person, and in fact will make decisions that drive away some percentage of viewers for some reason other than genre mismatch. The other is more often like a child trying to play all the keys on the piano at once, in order to make the loudest noise possible in a room full of other children doing the same. (For contrast, consider Hulu’s exclusive movies; they somehow made a best-in-category time loop movie?!)
If your product isn’t driving some people away for being a poor fit for their needs, then your product is probably too generic. In a field where nearly everything is generic, that may seem like it’s fine; but it’ll cost you customer stickiness to get away with it, as they’ll walk away from you the instant something less generic is a viable option.
Because when there's a lot of money involved, writing is generally done by committee. We only see the writer(s) who get the writing credit but not the process. Studio execs, producers, etc will impose their opinions/ideas on the script.
Smaller projects can afford to take risks but with huge projects there's a lot more pressure to not fail.
Ironically, this usually results in a worse product...
No offense to the Broccoli family or the franchise but these movies aren't exactly full of original new ideas. They've been rehashing the same formula since the 60s. It doesn't take a creative genius to come up with these plots and I'm pretty sure ChatGPT could generate new ones just as effectively
Seriously, reinventing Bond while modernizing it but keeping it a Bond movie is challenging. A challenge that people should accept.
(Hm. A Bond movie set in 1890... That might work. Read Kipling's "Miss Youghal's Sais" for ideas.[1])
[1] https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/miss-youghals-sais.htm
Be fine with the fact that you are not the target audience of the James Bond movies.
The films are pretty straight-ahead adaptations of Fleming novels through _Live and Let Die_. After that, they were out of books they had rights to, and the films take a serious plunge in terms of actual quality. For my money, the only genuinely watchable non-adaptation example after LALD is _Goldeneye_.
I mean, note the huge jump in quality when Craig came on when they finally DID have a Fleming novel they could work from again, right?
I'd agree that the last 25 years has given us a lot of duds and _Casino Royale_ is the main exception. However, I think it's more likely that Purvis and Wade are the issue here, as the 1977-1997 era showed that Eon could make a decent original Bond.
I found both Dalton outings pretty silly, though one of us gave us an early appearance by Benicio Del Toro. Dalton deserved better, as did Brosnan modulo _Goldeneye_, which is for me a top-5 entry.
I disagree on your conclusion re: "decent original Bond" between '77 and '97, but I'd argue that the success of _Skyfall_ and _No Time To Die_ does show they got around to it.
Also, while I understand everyone piling on Amazon for producing bad or mediocre shows (Rings of Power), they do have a number of pretty solid shows as well (Fleabag, Fallout, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, partially The Expanse, etc.). It is not as if other streaming networks are only producing solid hits.
As long as James Bond is a white, British male. You can't change the character after all this time, just for the sake of changing it. If they want to make someone else "007," fine, since someone will get the license Bond retires or gets killed.
But I’m not sure how they will pull it off at all.
The original Bond was stereotypical of how women were treated, for Queen and Country. The Daniel Craig reboot made Bond have a soul and conscience, and more depth in character. This was also aided by more time having passed and the world’s theater changed accordingly.
Where can go that won’t be a repeat of what Daniel Craig did? Go in the past or future?
I could see this working broadly without triggering the neo-cons sensibilities about whatever they call "wokeness" but being able to explore cultural acceptance, horrors of new technology, etc.
Why not just repeat Craig style? It would still be entertaining and I'd be happy without anything "new".
I'd have liked to see that but I think it's probably too late now, he is only four years younger than Craig.
I think that’s the a good tact to take. Let’s not pretend that Bond as a character hasn’t changed over the decades.
A good approach is how Machine Games approached Indiana Jones. The older movies, especially Temple, have some really uncomfortable scenes with women and Asian people. So they opted instead to portray Indy as we remember him, which is a gruff everyman who respects cultures and people and hates facists.
Bond can be done the same way right
Your comment changed Brocolli from a ‘she’ to a ‘he’ though… So maybe you don’t mind so much after all?
I think a gay black British man would do very well. The original Bond, both in the books and the older movies, despite the misogyny apparent of the time, also broke a lot of stereotypes for sex and licentiousness. Pushing those boundaries has been key to Bond for a long time. Why not a gay black man then, to hold to the same spirit.
Good lord, yes. Temple of Doom received criticism for its racist depiction of India even when it came out in 1984; it's downright uncomfortable to watch today.
Sure, he may not have visited Britain often in his later years, but that was for tax reasons and doesn't change where he was born.
Are you perhaps confusing British with English?
Ireland too