Amazon Acquires Creative Control of James Bond

Movies

He’s survived plane crashes, lasers, and shark tanks, but can James Bond make it through a rights acquisition? Today, a bombshell hit the entertainment world when EON Productions, the company that has owned the rights to James Bond since the first film in the series, Dr. No, was produced, signed over creative control of the beloved character to Amazon MGM Studios. EON owners and Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson (who inherited control of EON and James Bond from their father and stepfather, respectively, Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli) will remain “co-owners of the franchise.” Essentially, Broccoli and Wilson will remain silent partners, collecting money from any Bond-related productions that Amazon will make – plus however much Amazon ponied up for this deal, which Deadline claims is $1 billion. It’s surprising that Broccoli and Wilson would make a move this drastic considering the reported tensions between them and Amazon while discussing what to do with James Bond next; according to The Wall Street Journal, Broccoli called the Amazon folks “fucking idiots” during negotiations.

Honestly, there’s no good outcome with this because James Bond is caught between a rock and a hard place. According to that Wall Street Journal report, Amazon essentially wants to mine James Bond for content, with spin-offs, tie-ins, and anything else they think can wring a buck from the name. This is stupid because James Bond is like Sherlock Holmes, in that his world is interesting because of him; he shapes his world, and it ceases to exist without him. There was also talk of “modernizing” Bond by making him something other than a straight white male because that’s the one idea these people ever seem to have, no matter how many times it’s rejected. So, Amazon is probably going to make James Bond suck. But Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson aren’t much better; their Daniel Craig era sapped all the cool, wonder, and uniqueness out of James Bond, turning him into some generic modern hero without the many things that distinguished him – the suaveness, the womanizing, the taste, the culture, the fantasy. Broccoli seemed to be the chief architect of this, boasting that “Bond is evolving just as men are evolving. I don’t know who’s evolving at a faster pace.” Yes, this is who you want in charge of a character who is defined in many ways by his classical masculinity. (Imagine the ass-kicking someone would get after telling Sean Connery he needed to evolve his masculinity.) Wilson, meanwhile, says very little about it, and when he does, he displays a shocking ignorance about defining aspects of James Bond, once saying Bond was in “the SAS, or something.” (Bond was a commander in the British Royal Navy; that’s why he’s often called Commander Bond and wears a naval uniform.) No matter who won this, James Bond and his fans would lose.

Is there any hope for James Bond’s future? I’d say it’s a very, very slight maybe. Amazon is the studio behind Rings of Power, which seems to piss off every Lord of the Rings fan on Earth and is the likely template for their James Bond franchise. (“Did you know that those stories were all fake, and Moneypenny was the real 007 all along?”) But they also make Reacher, a red-blooded man’s man series with action, one-liners, hot women Reacher has sex with (and a different female lead each season), bad guys who get what they deserve, and zero apologies. They make The Boys, which gets more obnoxiously partisan and on-the-nose with every season, but they also made Bosch, a dark cop show with a masculine male lead and, again, no apologies. It’s also heartening that Rings of Power is being so poorly received, to the extent that despite having a five-season order, Amazon took a while to announce that season 3 had been greenlit. Then, there’s the price they paid for creative control of James Bond, if Deadline is correct; for $1 billion, they need to make money from this deal, and unless they’re complete morons, they’re looking at what happened to Disney when they ran Star Wars into the ground and thinking about how they can avoid the same fate. Finally, and I’m sorry to keep bringing this up, but I think the recent election and the clear cultural shifts (or at least, the perceived shifts when these idiots noticed what was staring them in the face for years) may shake some sense into Amazon.

So, it’s possible, if ever so slightly, that the right people will be put in charge of James Bond, and something good will come from this. What they need is people who actually like James Bond, and not the weepy, boring, meta, sterilized, “modern” Daniel Craig era. They need to get writers, producers, and directors who love Sean Connery and the rest of the pre-reboot Bond actors, who understand that the Bond Formula worked for forty years for a reason, who believe that it’s okay for beautiful women to be sexy and likable in a movie, who get that SPECTRE is the coolest evil organization ever, who can tell you who Ernst Stavro Blofeld is without referencing Dr. Evil, and who want James Bond movies to be fun again. I’m not particularly hopeful that any of this will happen, but if there’s anyone who can avoid the destruction of his franchise by the Hollywood elite, it’s 007.

Let us know what you think of Amazon acquiring creative control of James Bond in the comments!

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