I agree with all you’ve said. A feeling I had after seeing the film is that there’s definitely still room for James Bond on the big screen - and don’t be psyched out by Tom’s fantastic stunts or the sky high Rotten Tomatoes aggregates. Films like Casino Royale and Skyfall are still up there with the best of them in their own way. Even the lesser liked Bond films have a British charm other franchises can’t replicate.
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Glad it’s not just me!
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Well put. And one of the things that keep it contiguous with the Fleming fiction–the Britishness of it. Thinking about it, one example would be the British take on American life in DAF (both novel and film). I wonder if Guy Hamilton was the director most in tune with Fleming’s sensibility.
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I certainly hope that this will still be a selling point for Bond.
But in these days that might not be enough.
The industry is in huge turmoil. And with the writers‘ and the actors‘ strike fighting studios and streamers who are hellbent on letting the other side get bankrupt and ready to give up their residual rights, there will be a very long time ahead of us in which production is shut down and every timeline of future projects in doubt.
Bond movies have been very profitable during the last decades, sure, and EON has a tight grip on their property. But they have experienced dwindling box office before, and their reaction to the new reality might be again a long hiatus, longer than we expected after the Amazon sale.
The big question really will be: how much money will be considered a success next time around, with skyrocketing production and marketing costs? Many of us will say: hey, no problem, go back to the smaller budgeted spy thriller-concept Bond started out with. But the reality of mass audience movie making with needed and expected grosses will prohibit this.
And yes, I am deeply worried about the current situation of the industry because it will also affect my career… 
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Interesting. But not a sure sign this means it will go differently than Indy’s box office.
There are other ways in which Bond can excel. As much as I’ve enjoyed the Mission: Impossible films none of them have ever produced an iconic villain. There have been some stand out’s; Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian in 3 and Sean Harris’s Solomon Lane in Rogue Nation and Fallout being the best.
The term ‘Bond villain’ still carries weight. If you describe someone as being like a Mission:Impossible villain then no one will have a clue what you’re talking about. But say ‘Bond villain’ and you instantly conjure up images of eccentric megalomaniacs or larger than life henchmen with unusual weaponry.
Obviously it’s not as easy as just saying “put in a great villain” and the last two did miss the mark somewhat but Silva and Le Chifre were up there with the best of them.
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I think that the current EON regime has already proven that this approach can be successful. The proof of this is Skyfall, which saw its budget scaled back from its predecessor, which was estimated between $200-230 million, to somewhere between $150-200 million. Granted, those are not particularly low budgets, but they’re lower than what we’ve seen the films balloon into with Spectre ($245-300 million) and No Time to Die ($250-301 million), and considerably lower than what we could expect Bond 26 to come in at if inflation is still a global concern when EON begins production.
Skyfall tells the kind of small, more personal story that we often claim to wan to see when we talk about reigning things in following a particularly outlandish entry in the franchise. A simple tale of revenge and confronting trauma from one’s past with not a hint of a world domination plot to be found anywhere. And, with regards to its budget, I think it could easily be argued that the figures could have come in even lower had certain tweaks been made, because I don’t think that certain stretches of the film really reflect the money that was spent on the particularly well (i.e. the Shanghai sequence).
And what did EON get out of this more scaled back adventure? They were launched into the box office stratosphere, crossing the billion dollar mark for the first time (and yes, the Olympics did help), and actually having serious people opine about the potential for Bond at least having a seat at the awards table for that year, beyond the usual “Best Original Song” and special effects categories.
At the end of the day, if EON does indeed find themselves in some kind of bind about what to do in a challenging landscape, and it’s not as though the landscape hasn’t been challenging before throughout the franchise’s history, they have a template to fall back on in order to navigate their way through.
Right now I think every blockbuster could do with a more modest budget. Budgets have become really bloated recently and looking at this year’s box office it’s not paying off.
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I don’t think SKYFALL was a scaled back thriller, and its production costs were huge.
Going back to the 80‘s, when EON had to really scale back costs, it did result in good films, but LTK, for example, did show the lack of the usual budgets. That kind of reduction would be impossible these days, even if the storytelling could benefit from it.
Again, I do believe EON is capable to deliver a great Bond film for this next era. But even they are not invincible, especially not in these times.
Fact is: the current situation (post-pandemic moviegoing, streaming, soaring costs, dwindling interest in movies, and now the bankrupting tactics of studios keeping residuals from the creatives) is like nothing ever before. Nobody can say how it will turn out.
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Budget-wise and in terms of the scale of its set pieces, it is considerably scaled back from its predecessor, and does far more with its budget than Spectre or No Time to Die do with their considerably larger budgets. There are really only two major action set pieces in the film, the Turkey pre-title sequence and the Skyfall sequence at the end of the film. The other action scenes are considerably smaller in their ambitions than what we saw from the previous film, with a hand-to-hand fight in a Shanghai sky rise, a foot chase through the subway tunnels, a shootout in the government building, and so on.
There’s also no reason that the costs of the films needs to be that high. First and foremost, they don’t have to fill these films to the brim with big name actors like Javier Bardem, Judy Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Christoph Waltz, nor do they need to pay the actor playing Bond as much as Craig received for the final three films of his tenure, which by the end of his tenure wasn’t a negligible portion of the overall budget. Mission: Impossible has proven that you don’t need big names for the villains or supporting cast. Yes, those films have Tom Cruise, which is their draw, but the Bond name itself is a the draw for the Bond films in a similar way.
Why? This keeps being said but I have yet to see it backed up in any way. First and foremost, the box office downturn that they faced during the eighties was entirely of their own making, with audience fatigue setting in due to a release strategy that saw a new film either every year or every other year almost completely unchecked (save for TSWLM’s three year gap) since the 1960s. But, we have seen that, each time the Bond films have been presented as an “event” film, which they are now, the audiences have come out to support them in a big way. DAF,TSWLM, GE, CR, SF, SP, and NTTD have proven that the audiences will come out to support Bond when the chips are down, so to speak. Not saturating the market with a film every other year creates more of a demand for the product and makes it less likely for audience fatigue to set in, as it had by the time Dalton jumped into that pool and the winking fish sent him and Pam Bouvier riding off into the sunset.
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Film production costs have gone up extremely, and box office returns have gone down. That’s just how it is. Moving crews across the world has become more expensive, and getting actors of pedigree is also, rightly so, costly.
Question is: has fatigue set in with Bond in the most important demographic? Whether we like it or not, Bond is considered to be an old man‘s franchise.
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The returns on the past few films would suggest that it hasn’t. NTTD made three quarters of a billion dollars with a deadly airborne virus circulating around the globe. That screams success to me. And who knows, it might have been higher if the film had been, you know, actually good. 
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Erm, the film was excellent: why would box office returns be greater if it were merely good?
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Because people know the quality of a film before they see it! The internet TOLD me!!
What do you mean paradox?!!?
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Probably because I was making the argument from the perspective that the film is awful.
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Bond being considered “Dad movies” is why we need Bond video games back on the market. We had it good during the Brosnan era where there was always a movie or video game released annually. During the Craig era there were only four games released. EON has let an entire decade go by without any Bond video games. If they want to reach a younger broader audience video games needs to be part of the campaign.
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I‘m no gamer, too old. But I think you’re absolutely correct: the younger generations are more interested in gaming than movies - so this is an essential strategy to keep Bond in their conversation.
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And that is a problem which should and could be solved.
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I agree. There’s a lot to be said about getting the brand out there and making it feel more like an active property. Referencing past movies (even just old characters or locations in multiplayer) also helps keep them alive rather than seeming like even more distant memories, and can help pique interest for a new audience to seek them out. Ideally we have Project 007 available for purchase by the time they’re filming or releasing Bond 26.
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