I also consider Everything or Nothing and Bloodstone to be missing Bond adventures. EoN was an excellent game, with high-production values, and a great story. Willem Dafoe was excellent as the villain and I even liked the AVTAK connection. EoN is my favorite Bond game and a great cap to the PS2 era 007 trilogy with Agent Under Fire and Nightfire. Bloodstone fit well into the Craig-verse and could be interpreted as the first mention of Blofeld. However…
Had EoN been released as a film, it would have been lambasted as being even more preposterous and ridiculous than DAD. It had not just invisible cars, but invisible suits, too many car chases and too many MI6 sequences (though I’m sure much of that would’ve been cut out had it been released as a film). Bloodstone told a very strange and uneven story, that was clearly intended to be part 1 of a larger story, but I guess it could be retconned into the overall Blofeld arc of the Craig era or having Goldeneye Reloaded be the sequel and Trevelyan being the rich and powerful man. That said, the story doesn’t make a lick of cohesive sense as it feels like 2 completely separate adventures stitched together. The second half of which is really just one extremely long and extended chase. I like that it has a female main villain. The gameplay is fun and tight and the car chases are exciting.
I really do enjoy both games a lot and they do feel like missing films. However, they would have needed a lot of polish to be accepted as films.
On another bizarre note, Everything or Nothing does strangely predict the future as it predated the inundation of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina by a full year. Stranger than fiction…
Mod note: moved MaxZorin’s post to a new plot spoiler thread. It’s impossible to say as yet whether this is actually a spoiler or just a made up sequence - but better safe than sorry.
I wonder if the start delay was strictly strategic to allow Malek’s team to negotiate a window for his participation? EON would never show their cards on that until a contract was signed, so perhaps leaking the writer coming on board was a timely diversion? Just some speculation.
The Variety piece, with the headline on the front page “BOND 25 FULL STEAM AHEAD” reads like damage control by EON. If so, well done! In these days, not saying anything while rumors are swirling and building up is a tactic you can engage in only for so long.
This is what’s interesting to me:
the rumor of two female characters in the P&W draft last year, one younger agent, seems to have been a fact… and it also points to Madeleine only being in the film for a short time
it was not P&W´s last draft which, according to the last rumor, “nobody really was happy with” so Burns got brought in; it seems that Fukunaga wrote the last draft and - again, this reeks of damage control - everybody was very delighted with it, so much so that… Burns got brought in to at least polish if not rewrite it.
I´m speculating, of course, but from my experience (yawn, I know…) there are great directors who have fantastic ideas - and when they rewrite a script (which always happens at the last stage before production) you suddenly notice: oh, that doesn’t read better or even well at all.
The reason: many directors just are not writers. They are great at putting ideas on film, but not on paper.
So, Fukunaga might still bring in a magnificent Bond film. But the fact that Burns, a high profile and very expensive writer had to go over that draft, tells me that Fukunaga´s draft did not make people as happy as the Variety piece quotes.
Fair enough, and no problem with that. But people should take notice that the star directors they often consider magicians and artists who could turn everything into pure genius… well, in the end they have the same failings as everybody else. And sometimes they make great films, sometimes not.
BOND 25, however, seems to be on track for the upcoming shoot, and that’s good news for me.
I hope it will turn out to be a a great movie. More than that, I hope it will be a fun Bond film.