Thought some of you might be interested. Personally, I think we need the writers to come up with a homage to PTS in FYEO. Perhaps Waltz could get a pizzeria in stainless steel?
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Nice to know he likes the role enough to not let death stand in his way.
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Why not stay dead, Christophe. You have the perfect way out. Go and live quietly somewhere. Not many incredibly-boring-when-they-should-have-been-exciting movie villains get to leave this cleanly.
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Mr. Waltz knows how to generate clicks.
The better question to ponder is whether or not his “Blofeld” was, in fact, Blofeld.
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I was thinking the same thing. Given how convoluted the explanation of Waltz’s Blofeld was, I could see a retconning of the character down the road.
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It’s a new era, everything will be reset.
Highly probable that Blofeld will return. Not Waltz.
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See my money is on him never coming back, at least in our lifetimes. Pulling off a serious Blofeld in a post Dr. Evil world was always going to be tricky, and it just feels like, absent any kind of remake, they’re going to move on.
I took Waltz’s comments as very tongue-in-cheek. That said, love him as Blofeld but don’t like the foster brother backstory. It was definitely time for Blofeld to come back after being gone for about 45 years (I don’t count FYEO). For me, he is Bond’s Joker.
I think he should come back again, but not in the next actor’s tenure.
To be honest, I’m ok if Blofeld eventually appears again, but would not like Waltz back.
I was very excited with his casting and had high hopes, but after his two goes I’m afraid I really am not a fan of his take. With Spectre I originally put it down to it perhaps being my issue with the backstory, and the Bond/Blofeld scene in NTTD was probably the films weakest all around. But I’ve since realised his portrayal just really doesn’t do anything for me and it’s due to his performance more than the material.
I don’t hate his Blofeld but I think he’s the weakest. The first four (FRWL, YOLT, OHMSS, DAF) are excellent, but Waltz’s version doesn’t excite me in the same way. He’s too nice and SPECTRE isn’t the big, scary threat it should be. I support bringing them back and doing something different, but perhaps it’s best to wait a while longer.
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Blofeld, in the movies at least, seems to be a difficult character to adapt to the times.
He started as the evil mastermind with a fetish for white cats and world domination schemes. His appearance was altered to incorporate the usual prejudices (he’s bald! And he has a scar! Later on: he even seems to be a drag queen! Or: he is bald and in a wheel chair!). Only the Telly Savalas Blofeld was kind of virile and just a really bad guy (one could however see another prejudice: baldness indicating infertility, leading to his plan to make the world infertile with his virus).
Waltz-Blofeld did not get a cat to play with, but had a rather believable plan (in SPECTRE) for world domination - but the stepbrother angle gave him a psychological scar as well… aaaaand then, of course, for good nostalgia measure, he even got the Pleasance-scar, too.
The original idea for SPECTRE-Blofeld had the character totally re-imagined as an African warlord.
This seems to have been nixed because it was so not nostalgic-Bond-feeling.
But would that kind of complete re-thinking work in future eras? Or is Blofeld just a relic of a pre-Austin Power-time and not really adaptable to our times since stripping away his weirdness would result in blandness?
I think this is the way to go: have Bond be the rather traditional Bond “we all know and love”, but surround him with characters we seem to know but get to know in a totally different way.
M was a man, then a woman, then a man - but always someone who was to be trusted and capable (yeah, yeah, the NTTD-M faltered in the worst possible way, but in the end he was at least considered “still capable”). What could M be now? Should they strengthen the antagonistic attitude towards Bond? Would Bond these days have to work for someone he does not like at all, nor consider good in his job? Or does M always have to remain a paternal/maternal figure for him?
Moneypenny has always been a woman - but would that be a chance now to give M a male secretary? I don’t want to imply that this guy would have to be interested in Bond romantically. In fact, I would consider that a rather unimaginative reversal of the character. Maybe this Moneypenny could just be on his side, an ally against an M he also does not really like?
And Q - we had the colleague aging into an uncle aging into a grandfather. We had the buffoon with Cleese. And Whishaw´s young nerd. - I think it is high time to make a woman Q, and maybe have Bond flirt with her, while she just thinks of him as a younger brother figure she has to explain how to use the gadgets she invented.
What do you think?
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I don’t think Blofeld started off weird, just mysterious. We didn’t see his face, and his coldly unemotional voice made him threatening. The villains we did see were all scary and they were all terrified of Blofeld, so he had a real presence despite – or because of – our inability to put a face to him.
Where things started getting weird was with Pleasance, who got shoehorned into YOLT at the last second and, as would have been obvious from Day 1, was never going to seem threatening to anyone. So he got the crazy scar. Then we got the campy Gray version and the thuggish Savalas, but neither of them could eclipse weird little Donald and his crazy scar in the public consciousness.
I don’t think “Blofeld” must equal “Weird” but I do agree he’ll probably never work on screen again because manipulative masterminds pulling strings around the world is a hard thing to get across visually. We can’t go back to the “no face” days because as soon as you say “Blofeld” we picture that Dr Evil version, and we’ll never out-Pleasance Pleasance in the OTT department.
I think Blofeld’s day has passed and I would argue that as soon as he appeared in YOLT, his usefulness was already over. Any physical form you give him is going to be a step down from the untouchable “man behind the curtain.”
For a second, I thought where you were going was, “What if Blofeld were a woman?” And if you had, I’d have to reverse myself and say maybe it could be made to work. If we had a recurring, continuing threat from a female mastermind who was a real challenge to Bond, it could be very interesting. Maybe we could even have a couple of red herrings where 007 thinks the Bond Girl du Jour is actually his arch enemy.
Would Bond these days have to work for someone he does not like at all, nor consider good in his job?
Well, we’ve seen an M who thinks Bond is reckless, inefficient and a security risk (and in Craig, a Bond who really was all those things), but I guess it would be a switch if it went the other way and Bond thought M was incompetent or foolish. The trouble is, we need to believe the missions Bond is sent on are valid and important, which requires a certain level of aptitude at the top. I think a genuinely incompetent M would be short-lived; we’d pretty much have to see them sacked by the end of their first film.
That said, I might be open to a straight-up villainous M that Bond has to expose and kill. But again, it would have to be a one-off.
At this point I’ll just be happy to have an M who isn’t revealed as Bond’s long-lost aunt or uncle.
It would certainly present us with a new dynamic. From crusty old uncle who sees Bond as rash and irresponsible to young cyber-genius who sees Bond as a lumbering thug to female Q who just wants Bond to read his instruction manuals and stop trying to make time with her.
The trouble is it makes me think of Gardner’s “Q’ute” character, who I never took to at all.
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True. I imagine, however, that this other kind of M could be someone who is not an idiot, only someone who has been cleverly used his friends in high places to get this position. Not someone who had any military experience, for example. The missions would still be important and something Bond believes in. But M would make decisions which Bond would have to suffer from and prove very adept at turning them to his advantage in the field.
Or this M would make decisions who are perfectly valid but Bond considers the wrong approach. Maybe the arc for both were to find respect for each other, seeing the world from their different point of views and finding common ground, rather than the usual Bond does his thing and M at the end is happy.
Maybe it would be interesting to flip the traditional dynamic where M, despite occasionally berating Bond for his methods, ultimately sticks up for him against the clueless upper admin-types in the Ministry. What if they reversed that so M really doesn’t care for Bond, but some benefactor higher up in the government appreciates the results he delivers and sees the need for someone who pushes the limits? What if that person thinks it’s worth having a relative loose canon like Bond around since the worst that can happen is he gets himself killed or maybe creates an incident that M can take the fall for?
Maybe there could be a foil for Bond, another double-Oh agent, seen or unseen, who M likes better and tries to give the better assigments? Maybe M could send Bond to follow up on less promising leads, only to have Bond be in the right place after all and save the day? Or maybe M’s favorite could get in trouble only Bond could get him/her out of?
In the end, though, I don’t know how much the average Bond filmgoer cares about office politics. What matters is what happens when Bond gets to the scene of the action, not how he got there. I miss the days when the MI-6 crew showed up just long enough to say “Here’s the mission, good luck” and then got the Hell out of the way. It might be more interesting to make the office crowd more of a hindrance instead of helpful voices in his earpiece hand-holding him through his missions like some kind of flesh-and-blood drone, but in the end I’d prefer to just see less of them, period. Bond has become more reliant on his support team than Ethan Hunt, and while I definitely think EON could learn a lot from the M:I films, the “team” thing is the last element I want them to swipe.
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Agreed.
The real question is: will the Mi6-crew be cast with high profile actors in the next era again - or will EON be so courageous to only use good but not famous actors?
There’s a tradition which seems to have started with Superman: The Movie, where producers hedge their bets on a newcomer in the lead by stacking the deck with respected, famous faces in supporting roles. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the next Bond film followed that model. Maybe they’ll even bring back Dame Judi as “M v3.0” since she worked her magic for the last two guys already.
Of course by the time they get around to it, maybe Eddie Redmayne will be old enough to step in as “M.”
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Hey, what about a young M?
Bond being older would be interesting.
We almost got there with Robert Brown. He was only 6 years older than Roger. (!)
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The area where the Waltz-Blo seemed to be moving initially - the peddler of information at a high level - did at least chime with the initial description of the character in Thunderball and there’s still something to be mined there, not least because in the book M admits that his service has bought/commissioned stuff from SPECTRE in the past, which is a greyer area than Spectre’s “ooh - information - bad - Bloberhauser is in your toaster”, which was a bit thick.
However, no need to see Waltz back. Chalk up another lost opportunity.
If they “do” Blofeld again, would be amused to see Bond’s every success inadvertently making Blofeld (he or she) more powerful each time. Thought that was were they were going with Spectre and again - didn’t.
All a bit inert.
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