I’m OCD about certain things, honestly. It’s properly the Asperger’s Disorder in me. No harm intended. I’m still grateful to Richard Maibaum and his work, BELIEVE ME. However, if sites like this existed back in his time writing, fans would probably tired of him as much as Purvis and Wade. Not saying ANY of them were bad, just some fresh writing blood could have been used. I know writing a Bond story in any media isn’t easy. But being a bit of a writer myself, it’s a tough love situation.
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What I always understood is that Maibaum was one of the important factors for the success, along with Connery, Young, Adam, Barry, etc., especially in the early years of the Bond films. Especially when you see his contribution to films like FRWL, GF, TB, OHMSS. Those scripts are probably even better than Fleming’s original books.
Of course, it is often difficult to determine exactly who wrote what and the scripts and final films of LALD and TMWTGG are much weaker than the other films from the 60s and 70s, but Hamilton’s direction will also be guilty of it.
Still, overall, I wish the scripts from the last 25 years had the quality of those from the '60s, '70s and '80s.
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I can only add what used to be widespread opinion amongst the fan base back in the 70s and 80s - that Maibaum supposedly was the guy to keep as much Fleming as possible in the scripts. And that he tried to keep a narrative in the foreground and not so much move from one set piece to the next. I think the Steve Rubin book of the 80s mirrored this sentiment in several chapters.
Maibaum’s last few efforts for Bond show the remaining scraps of Fleming barely held water in increasingly flimsy plot lines. But looking at four years worth of treatments and scripts for ON HER MAJESTY’S it’s obvious this could have turned out a very different film, not for the better. Maibaum seems to have done something right with this and other scripts.
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My timeline: Most things are the same with minor changes too casting and writing credits.
Keep Jack Lord as Felix Leiter in GF and TB. Leaves to film Hawaii 5-0. David Hedison takes the role in DAF, LALD and LTK.He is considered too old after LTK and its long break. Felix is written and portrayed less over the top in DAF. In LALD, he leads the CIA in the boat chase after Bond instead of Sheriff Pepper and the southern police. LTK plays out the same way as in the film, with Bond and Leiter sharing a bittersweet moment after Sanchez is defeated.
He is also in GE, instead of Jack Wade, with Michael Madsen playing him. He reprises his role in DAD, leading us to get a minor distrust between Bond and Leiter for the first time in the series. This also gives us the version that is in DAF, that fans don’t like. In TLD and TND, the CIA roles are replaced with Q. He is there is technical support for him to help out with and explain. Desmond Llewelyn is also Q and referred to as such in DN. He is not in LALD and TWINE is still his final appearances as is. Other recasting notes: Max von Sydow is Dikko Henderson, making it more of a shock for the audience when he is killed suddenly so soon. Peter Burton is Morzeny in FRWL. Faye Dunaway is Octopussy. I really don’t like it when EON uses the same people for different big roles!
Now for proper writing credits. FRWL’s screenplay is fully credited to Richard Maibaum and Johanna Harwood. No adaptation credit. TSWLM is credited to Tom Mankiewicz after Wood’s and Maibaum’s credits. For GE, Michael France and Kevin Wade are given screenplay credits after the other two. France is still credited with the story. For TND, Bruce Feirstein is credited with the story. He is also credited with the screenplay along with Nicholas Meyer, Dan Petrie, Jr. and David Campbell Wilson. They are credited in Raymond Benson’s novelization, they should be credited in the movie. For TWINE, Dana Stevens is credited for screenplay after the trio. For QOS, Michael G. Wilson, Paul Haggis and Marc Forster are credited with the story. Joshua Zetumer is credited with the screenplay, after the trio. Lastly for NTTD, Paul Haggis is credited with the story. Sometimes, writers honestly don’t get the credit they deserve.
Now for unmade James Bond material that should have been made.
First, Bruce Feirstein should have done novelizations of Everything or Nothing and Bloodstone. EON should have had a scene between Max Zorin and Nikolai Diavolo, maybe too make Diavolo more evil or even strangely sympathetic. Moneypenny should be included as well. I’d also have more AVTAK ties in the novel as well. Explain why Diavolo wasn’t at Project Main Strike. Also a proper introduction about why Jaws is back and how Diavolo hired him. Also give more background info on all of the new characters introduced in EON’s story. Same with Bloodstone, in particular Nicole Hunter, Rak and Stefan Pomerov. I’d also reference CR, QOS and GE, make Bond in mid-career. End of the story, Bond questions if Quantum was behind it. Lastly, I’d like John Logan to write a novelization of Skyfall. Including more scenes and backstory for everyone, in one way or another, in particular Sévérine and her deleted scenes.
Two movies that should have been made. Timothy Dalton’s 3rd Bond film. I’d have Sir Anthony Hopkins as Denholm Crisp. With Roger Spottiswoode directing. Released in December 1992, to avoid competition, namely with Aladdin and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Next, I’d have the Jinx spinoff be a Jinx and Wai Lin spinoff of them working together. They take on the Spang Brother’s worldwide gambling empire. Here’s where I get controversial: they are played by Kevin Kline and Kevin Spacey. Michael Madsen comes back as Felix Leiter and Pierce Brosnan as a cameo as Bond. The reason given for why Bond isn’t helping them out is that the events of Everything or Nothing are happening at the same time. Willem Dafoe cameo is welcome as well. Purvis and Wade would write the main script and David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible 1, Spider-Man 1) would give rewrites. Michael Apted would direct.
As for my personal future timeline, I have a few ideas. Mostly adapting books faithfully with a modern era for awhile. Start with Forever and a Day, setting up Bond and the MI6 regulars, with a minor role for Charmian Bond and Bond moving to London. Here, he could meet May. Next is Carte Blanche, setting up Bond’s world with reoccurring characters. More also into Bond’s family history using his parents’ subplots. Other ideas for the future are using Dynamite Comics’ Felix Leiter story for a subplot like M’s in SF. Another is building up Blofeld and Spectre again using an original story, preferably in a novel with a modern day setting.
Some ideas for now, James Bond is one of the best characters ever!
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Shocking opinion: the Bond franchise is essentially dead. It’ll coast on for a while, if they ever get it up and running again that is, but it’s pretty much done as a creatively viable entity.
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While I still hold hope - the hiatus after 1989 also made me think it was all over - the circumstances now are bitterly ironic.
On the one hand they have Amazon now as a financial backer, on the other hand the marketplace has become so volatile as it has never been before.
In addition to that, they have to recast, they have to rethink, and the Craig era mined all the nostalgia and all the untried concepts left. Where can they go now really?
With Bond actually dying at the end of the last film it really set an end point to the whole series. When they start again that kind of definitive ending to the character will be something they cannot easily repeat - maybe that’s a good thing. But they also cannot easily repeat the other tropes without audiences and critics yawning.
In my mind, killing Bond should have been off the table, making it easier to continue (without those real world consequences and drama).
But if they took their inspiration from „Logan“, maybe they will now look at „Deadpool and Wolverine“.
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Not so shocking, no. We’ve read or written that sentiment in some form or other for years, time and again hoping to be proven wrong. Many of the analyses here - in particular Jim’s 007th chapter/minute - mirror just that growing unease about the creative void our common interest has been showing for some time.
Then again, the Bond series has always aimed for the sweet spot of pop culture’s underbelly, the centre mass of the cultural comment. Bond has never really been avant-garde, he just happened to ride the trends very successfully. If we look at the state of our entertainment output, everything a series, nothing but remakes of remakes all around us, then it’s hardly surprising the Bond series doesn’t set out to boldly sail into uncharted waters.
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With that now more pervasive as before, Bond could either fit in or - shock! - have it much easier to go original!
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It would be the first time for them in several decades.
They’ve been recycling the same handful of basic stories the past at least three decades. The Craig era is basically just the Brosnan era with a prestige, Oscar-bait paint job.
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I’m ok with the series finishing - shocking
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I imagine Amazon would be, too.
The rights to the movies? Check.
No big money thrown away for new films which could dilute the worth of the previous ones? Check.
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I think we‘re all more or less aware it’s going to be restarted at some point. As I see it we‘ve already had Bond (62 - 89), Bond 1.5 (95 - 02) and Bond 2.0 (06 - 21). There will be Bond Mk III and somewhere further down the road ‘All New Bond’. 
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No, no, no! If no one wants it, I’ll volunteer to play the new Bond. Give me some gadgets, a nice lady, I already have a Lotus, add to it a devilish villain, with a common plan to destroy the world and we can start! No big deal! 
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They can do a pub quiz. Hell, a whole series of them, for each main market. The US versions concentrate on the calibre of every prop gun, the Asian versions on the actors and the European/African ones on the dishes. This could run longer than The Simpsons.
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The next one will follow the same pattern as the last two eras.
The opening film where everyone gives it their best effort, with a new Bond coming in having to go on some assignment to prove his worth to the new boss, even though ostensibly they’ve known each other for years yet have somehow just met.
Then, after its success, they’ll rush another one into production in two years time, trying to capitalize on what made the previous one a hit, and pack it to the wall with action.
People won’t like it as much, so they’ll come back with a more personal story, where M’s past comes back to haunt him or her, Bond suffers an injury, and MI6 is attacked.
Then they’ll, depending on the number of films the actor makes, follow it up with either one or two of the biggest piles of crap the franchise has ever seen, with a heavily sci-fi inspired tale to send a once great and popular Bond out with a whimper, all while using that last film to heavily reference happier times in the franchise.
Rinse and repeat.
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I’d prefer Bond spinoffs in the literary world only. Still as many here would agree, adult Bond should IFP’s main focus. Here’s an article that I mostly agree with.
What an expanded James Bond universe might look like
007 during wartime? Miss Moneypenny’s early years? The origin of Blofeld’s evil? Here are the Fleming spin-offs and prequels that could be
Jake Kerridge10 September 2024 • 6:15pm
In the late 1950s Ian Fleming wrote a treatment for a proposed James Bond television series, featuring the exciting notion of Bond going undercover as a racing driver and haring around the Nürburgring while his enemies tried to finish him off.
Alas, the series was never made (although Anthony Horowitz recycled the plot in his 2015 Bond novel Trigger Mortis). And in fact 60 years after Fleming’s death, no Bond-based television drama has ever been made. But could that be about to change?
These days every blockbuster franchise has its spin-off, from Amazon Prime’s unloved Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power to HBO’s slightly less unloved Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. And since Amazon gained half the rights to the Bond franchise after purchasing MGM in a $8.5 billion deal in 2021, after a year of tortuously protracted negotiations, it seems highly likely that the Bond universe will one day expand into long-form television.
Last year’s Amazon Prime reality show 007: Road to a Million (a second season is currently being filmed) could be seen as a canary in the coal mine, or at least a toe in the water. This has Brian Cox, in the role of the sinister “Controller”, setting espionage-themed challenges to members of the public, and laughing supervillainously when they muck them up. The title overpromises, however: there is about as much 007 in 007: Road to a Million as there is Godot in Waiting For Godot.
Bond producers Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli with Daniel Craig Credit: Getty
The hurdle for Amazon in making a proper Bond spin-off is that the other half of the franchise rights remains with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the siblings who have overseen Eon Productions, which makes the Bond movies, since 1995. “We do not want to expand [the franchise] any other way,” Broccoli told Yahoo Entertainment when 007: Road to a Million was first streamed. “This idea is something that was brought to us and we really loved it, and we loved the fact that it’s real people. So I think this was sort of a one-off, but we’re not looking to expand the Bond universe into television.”
No doubt Broccoli and Wilson are anxious not to dilute the appeal of the films by saturating audiences with too much Bond; but it’s hard to believe that this is music to Amazon’s ears. One suspects Amazon are busily negotiating behind the scenes to persuade Broccoli and Wilson to reconsider. Which of the combatants in this debate, I wonder, will end up - metaphorically of course - shoved off the footbridge into the piranha pool?
Scouring Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, I think there are certainly several elements that could be expanded into television prequels, sequels, spin-offs and reboots. To start with, there could be proper period adaptations of the novels, especially those which the films mangled out of all recognition. I would love to see a decent adaptation of Fleming’s Moonraker, which is set entirely in Britain and features a Nazi plot to destroy London with a nuclear warhead: nothing to do with the disappearing space shuttle of the film, which was ludicrously intended to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars.
Or what about Fleming’s uncharacteristically tender and experimental The Spy Who Loved Me, with a “Bond girl”, Viv Michel, who manages to be three-dimensional? Anything in the vein of ITV’s excellent recent version of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File, capturing the book’s spirit even if deviating from its plot, would be very welcome.
Of course, such a series would be at a disadvantage in inviting comparison with the brilliant early Bond films of the 1960s, the first few being made while Fleming was still writing. The most obvious alternative is to produce a prequel series answering the intriguing question of what Bond actually did during the Second World War.
We know from the obituary M writes when Bond is presumed dead in You Only Live Twice that he served (as Fleming had) in Naval Intelligence, as a “lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR”. There are hints elsewhere of a wider experience, however, notably when he comes under machine-gun fire in Dr No: “Then came the swift rattling roar Bond had last heard coming from the German lines in the Ardennes.” How on earth did a Commander from Naval Intelligence end up in the Battle of the Bulge?
Ian Fleming during the Second World War
The only one of the many post-Fleming Bond authors to nod towards Bond’s war record is William Boyd, who in Solo (2013) gives 007 flashbacks to his arrival in Normandy just after D-Day as part of the intelligence-gathering Commando group 30 Assault Unit - a nice in-joke, as Fleming was a key figure in setting the unit up. Bond vs the Nazis could make for great TV although a fresh-faced actor would be needed, as we are told Bond was only 17 in 1941, having lied about his age to get started on his war service.
Another possibility would be to go earlier than the war and follow the adventures of the schoolboy Bond, which have already been the subject of a series of YA novels by Charlie Higson and Steve Cole (although if aimed at a younger audience the series would have to handle delicately the scene in which Bond fools around with a maid when he is “12 or thereabouts” and gets expelled from Eton.)
Otherwise we could go post-war and deal with how exactly Bond gets 00 status and his early missions (covered in Horowitz’s 2018 novel Forever and a Day) or even perhaps have Bond pass the dreaded 00 retirement age of 45 and become a private agent. Bond in old age might be going too far, however, having already been the subject of a skit by Alan Coren (“Bond tensed in the darkness and reached for his teeth…”).
Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny in From Russia with Love Credit: Alamy
One barrier to Fleming conquering television drama in the way that John le Carré or Agatha Christie have is that he didn’t have lots of different central characters: all of his novels feature James Bond (apart from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which swallows up enough of the TV schedule every bank holiday as it is). But there is at least a decent supporting cast to people spin-offs in which Bond doesn’t have to be a physical presence.
Perhaps we could have a prequel about the early career of M, who could just about have been there as a young man at the beginning of MI6 when it was founded in 1909 - or if you prefer a series based on the Judi Dench version of M, perhaps drawing on the pioneering career of the first female MI5 director-general, Stella Rimington. Or a series explaining the mysterious background of Miss Moneypenny, who could plausibly have worked as a secretary for any 1960s figure from Don Draper to Leonard Swindley before pitching up to work for M. (Perhaps the “Moneypenny Diaries” books by Kate Westbrook, which give her a back story in colonial Africa, could be adapted.)
Then there is everybody’s favourite boffin Q (known as Major Boothroyd in Fleming’s books), who, it was recently announced, is to be the hero of a new series of crime novels by Vaseem Khan, current chair of the Crime Writers’ Association (the first book, Quantum of Menace, will be published next year). A Q television series could provide a good role for one of our senior actor knights if they went for an old buffer Desmond Llewelyn type, or something with more of a contemporary Doctor Who vibe if they go for a Ben Whishaw figure: anything will do as long as they don’t resurrect the tenaciously unretirable John Cleese’s comedy Q from the Pierce Brosnan era.
Pierce Brosnan and John Cleese in Die Another Day
If Amazon wants to do something based in the US, how about the adventures of Felix Leiter, PI? Fans of the books will know that Bond’s CIA pal is savaged by a shark in Live and Let Die (Fleming wanted to kill him off but relented after objections from his US publisher) and, after being left with a prosthetic leg and a hook for a hand, is forced to retire and join the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Perhaps the great Jeffrey Wright, underused as Leiter in the recent Bond movies, has what it takes to make this rather unconvincing private eye plausible.
I’d also like to see an adaptation of Kim Sherwood’s recent novels Double or Nothing and A Spy Like Me, which focus on a number of different agents in the 00 section. The premise of the series is that Bond has been captured in action and his colleagues are trying to find him while also dealing with their other missions - a cunning way of having Bond as a dominant but not overwhelming off-screen presence.
And those are the heroes: what about the villains? Every baddie, from Hannibal Lecter to The Joker to Cruella de Vil, gets a humanising origin story these days. Why not a prequel depicting the child bullying, career setbacks or humiliations in love that turned Scaramanga and Blofeld, Dr No and Mr Big and Rosa Klebb sour?
Sequels would not be possible, as being a Bond villain always ends the same way: but it’s a different matter with the more fortunate Bond girls. Nearly every book begins with Bond single after having gone into the sunset with some feisty cutie at the end of the previous one: what happens to them all? Perhaps we could have a show in which they all get together and use the skills they’ve learned from observing Bond in action to form a crime-fighting agency: the battle of wits between Pussy Galore and Domino Vitali to be the boss would be quite something.
Finally, there is a great series to be made about the half-Japanese child with whom Kissy Suzuki is pregnant in Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, whom Bond, the father, knows nothing about when he leaves Japan at the end of the book. Bond has always been big in Japan: how much more so if a Japanese son or daughter turned up on his doorstep? With all this possible material, resistance from Broccoli and Wilson is surely futile: before long the films may be only a small cog in the Bond franchise.
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I feel that Daniel Craig had only two great “Bond. James Bond” moments. The end of CR (one of the best deliveries of the line in general) and as a good comedic moment in NTTD. The deliveries of it in SF and SP were way too whisper-like and forced. The other actors were generally at least ok with their deliveries of it.
For video games: I would try to combine Goldeneye Rogue Agent into the From Russia With Love game. I’d have the game open with the Dr. No finale, as the film didn’t have much action. Skip over the opening action scene from the game. Then, have the game story be played as it already is. However, there would be two side plots, with Goldfinger and Scaramanga. Have GF be funding Octopus, and end the game in Fort Knox (with some additional writing to fill in the gaps). As for Scaramanga, his subplot would be once again trying to prove that he’s the best against Bond and even Octopus. He’d be watching them both from the shadows. Then, he’d be a surprise final villain, for Bond. Some more writing would of course be needed. Also, Xenia Onatopp would Grant’s main henchwoman. She would have a fight with Bond instead of a lackluster plane crash. Sean Connery, Christopher Lee and Famke Janssen would reprise their movie roles for the game. That’s my alternative in Bond history for awhile.
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I think Daniel Craig has never been better than as Benoit Blanc.
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He definitely seemed more comfortable in the role.
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He was a good Bond, I won‘t argue against it.
I just don’t think, as so many now, he was the best. It is silly how quickly the achievements of his predecessors are forgotten.
As for Blanc: it seems to me that Craig needs a more traditionally built character with clearly defined traits and quirks to shine.
He has the sense of humour needed for Bond but he chose to severely underplay it and stress the brooding and the tragedy.
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