Is this our consolation prize for Bond now being owned by an oligarch?
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We will very likely not get numerous entries of the past under Bezos, either because he himself deems them unsavoury, or because they donāt sit well with the mad king of Jonestown 2.0. Whatever the writers cobble together will have to be a real balancing act.
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They almost canāt help but make a film better than Spectre, although, on some level, Iād actually be kind of impressed if they were able to pull off one that was worse.
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First and foremost Iād want groundwork laid that Iām comfortable with. A good cast and creative team with the general spirit of James Bond translated onto the screen. If they can achieve that itās showtime. Meaning Iām absolutely open to different cars, female Q, black M and different ways of telling the story. Such things have precedent and just havenāt been put on the big screen yet.
Iāll add I donāt think change has to equal gunbarrel tinkering after that was already done in the Craig era. A sense of traditional familiarity before launching into the future would be the way to go, I think. Itās all about the core story being told. It makes me quite excited about the possibilities just writing about it, actually.
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For the last couple of weeks Iāve been consistent in saying that I think the first film back will be more in line with a GE, greatest hits style package, full of gunbarrels, female title song artists, and plenty of 007-theme sprinkled throughout the soundtrack. Thereāll be a Q and it will be āfunnyā and a Moneypenny that will be āflirty.ā There will be a car and it will do āstuffā with the āstuffā it has; the director will be on the record as being āa massive fanā because āI was brought up on this stuff.ā
The film will be a runaway success, because Bond always is when heās been away, and weāll all breathe a sigh of relief that Amazon didnāt cock it up.
And then, as always been the case, it will be āsecond albumā time and thatās where the cracks (as they pretty much always have) will start to show. FRWL is the outlier - Laz never did a second, TWTGG came too quickly after LALD, with the same old creative hands clearly at the end of their inspirational tether; LTK, criticised for too overtly chasing the trends; TND - just sort of there, a fast food Bond served up when twenty odd writers have a go at a script that ends in the hands of the chap that did the prior film, leaving nothing distinctive in the memory (go on, ask one of your non-Bond friends about too many of the films and theyāll get their story beats confused); and QoS - cue fandom ācivil war.ā
What Amazon do with all this is secondary for me - as Iāve said before, what is to be done with it, that is not truly fresh and original? The second film (as DIsney discovered) will be the trap for new management.
The first film will be a hit and weāll all feel at home. But the direction of #2 will be decider - if itās more of the same, some of us will be yelling; if itās too different, another group will be.
I donāt think anyone at Amazon is sitting there with some grandiose idea that will revolutionize the Bond films themselves; but unlike EON, they have an idea and a willingness to see what the name can do for them beyond Episode 26 or whatever number weāre on.
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And if they are lucky, they will be praised for what they do in a fashion similar to what Trump said about another property owned by Bezos:
āI think a guy like Bezos is ā Iāve gotten to know him, and I think heās trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with The Washington Post.ā
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5198396-trump-jeff-bezos-washington-post/
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They will proabably map out at least three films with interconnections to the streaming series, you know, universe building.
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If thereās a concrete plan for 1-3 potential spinoffs they probably already show their hand with casting; e.g. if some Q spinoff was aimed for they would probably cast someone with a significant draw (and might even ask Ben Wishaw back).
Not sure how the Q novels would fit into that since I doubt Amazon would want to branch off a streaming series into cosy crime, even with a spy element. Worst case might be they just cancel that series and start from scratch.
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This whole Amazon thing has left me in a conundrum.
As near as I can remember, I have been on CBn since around 2004. The entire time my profile picture has been the front door of EON House.
I thought that with this new era upon us my profile should live in the now and reflect that, so I looked up the entrance of Amazon in Seattleā¦
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Frankly, I prefer the present one.
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Looks a bit like itās modeled after Bezos fiancĆ©ā¦
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Please no.
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Iām Canadian and would not want to see that but Iām all in favour of Bond coming to Canada and working with our security services. In fact, thatās an unused part of a Fleming novel. Still remember getting goosebumps reading it and realizing Bond was in my home town of Ottawa.
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Spot on. While there are certainly similarities (weāve been called the decaf version of America), the one thing the vast majority of English Canadians agree on is that weāre not Americans.
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You are so lucky to be able to type that.
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Or, conversely, is Jeff Bezos trying to subliminally announce that heās got big balls?
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I donāt get the fascination of men saying that about their genitalia. In fact, bigger does not mean more testosteron or any sort of āmanlinessā. Bigger often points to a problem a doctor should take a look at.
So much for todayās menās health announcement.
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