Where are his hands? They’re not by his sides, there are no pockets in the pants, and his elbows aren’t bent as needed for the hands to be clasped together back there. He must be gripping his butt cheeks.
I believe this is a find: the original reference photo for Dan Gouzee’s painted poster art for the later-rejected campaign slogan: “Hold onto your ass: Bond is taking you to outer space.”
Or given his expression, maybe it’s a candid of Roger puzzling over the actual tagline, “Where all the other Bonds end, this one begins.”
Honestly I cannot tell, I was still getting the usual imagery of Bond with gun on everything I checked. It could be a regional thing though, or something that’s introduced in phases. Or - hopefully - somebody just looked at the results and decided they were horrible.
This seems to be a constant practice on these streaming sites. They shuffle through new artwork for the same films all the time. Someone at Amazon probably had an idea for a new template for a somewhat unified look for the poster art, tried it out, and it didn’t work, so apparently they’ve moved on. It’s not a particularly big deal.
Amazon will have gained a bit of valuable clickthrough and conversion data from this, to the extent that part of me wonders if that may have been the purpose all along.
The fact that Amazon did not even comment but continued to use only stills with no guns makes me think of the article in which an Amazon executive resentfully said that they don’t think James Bond is a hero.
I have to admit, Barbara Brocolli apparently calling Amazon “f****** idiots” came to mind when I first saw the guns being removed from the posters. They’ve heard what the fans think and sanity has prevailed. I just hope that sensible decisions are made in the first place when it really matters, because you can’t undo everything. Things like an official Bond actor announcement, or a shooting script ready to go with cameras coming out on location.
Yeah, it is concerning. Amazon’s ability to shoot themselves in the foot and not pre-empt this reaction - in today’s cultural landscape - well it really does sound like Broccoli’s characterisation was spot on.
This was not an intern suddenly playing with graphics - it was Amazon making a decision (still so weird - why?) and then doing a Homer Simpson trying to vanish into a hedge again.
I doubt it was intern too. However, I seriously doubt the initial decision was very high up (i.e., a manager or a junior executive made the decision). What I guessed happened is someone took some broader direction for graphics in general (i.e., not just Bond) and took it too literally without thinking things through. Once it got out, someone higher up stepped in and told them to reverse it.
It might be a means of exploring audience expectation of Bond, whilst they build their version of him. Given the generally negative response about this representation, the audience expectation is that he is a man with a gun. So that’s one box ticked. We might be on the receiving end of some market research.
It’s only tangentially related to our phenomenon, but in a way that suggests these weird ‘artefacts’ we’re witnessing are perhaps the result of a wider context. We’ll see how much water that idea holds…
I just watched OHMSS yesterday. Granted, I’m probably an outlier in Amazon’s whole algorithm, but I watched it, enjoyed it, and will watch more while they’re streaming on there again.
I’d be curious to know, how many are like me and will stream a Bond title out of convenience rather than pulling out a Blu-Ray, especially if I can stream it in 4K UHD?
[shocking confession: I don’t even own a whole set, just my favourite six or seven]
I used to watch them when they ran on the public broadcasters (and when it was still something ‘special’). Later, I booked titles to my fancy on VOD and that suits perfectly.
[second shocking confession: I don’t even know where exactly I’d have to look for my few physical Blu-rays in the vast halls of my aggregated consumerist wealth (read: cheap plastic tosh)]
I bought the BOND 50 box set of DVD/Blu-Rays (minus SPECTRE and NTTD) and it sits in my bedroom atop my dresser right next to the DVD/Blu-Ray box set of the Zatoichi film series and the complete DVD collection of The Wild Wild West. Yes, I’m really letting my freak flag fly right now!
Bought the Monsterbox some 20 years ago, containing the SE DVDs until DAD (not quite right, it had a blank DVD case, meant to be replaced with the DAD DVD after the release). Some of the UE DVDs, I bought when they were up for grabs at the local media store (but I’ve got all of them as promo screeners in plain white sleeves). I have DVDs of CR (original release, the one that cam with the mini-Making-of-book and the three-disc Deluxe edition) and QoS, for SF and SP, I have both DVD and BluRay, NTTD was the first for which I didn’t buy a DVD.
Most of them have never seen the inside of a player.
I usually watch Bond movies on the side, when they’re on free TV, which happens quite a lot in Germany.
