“They’ll print anything these days.”
The idea of a James Bond section inside a theme park never seemed like a possibility, and perhaps it would make the brand feel…cheap? But after reading it will likely just be a stunt show I’m somewhat underwhelmed. So much for high speed car/boat chase concepts, lair infiltration simulations and the like.
I sometimes fantasized about a Bond themepark, incl. the TMWTGG Scaramanga’s shooting range and a wild water ride where you are “chased” in a boat and “sail” towards a waterfall…
A house where you have to find a hidden room.
In the last section, you need to steer a moon buggy to the exit.
Don’t forget before leaving to buy a rubber LALD snake at the merchandise shop!
And Bond-themed tarot deck.
I‘m sure he works harder than his employees.
Quite the compensation for someone in the movie business who chooses not to release completed films.
Jurassic World: Rebirth , which is released in cinemas in July, is the third movie about dinosaurs that Universal has made in the UK. Recently filed documents reveal that HMRC gave its predecessor, 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion , £89.1m – believed to be the largest payment for a film since the UK government incentive scheme began in 2007. The scheme, designed to drive investment in the UK’s film industry, gives studios a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the sum they spend on making a movie in the UK, provided that at least 10% of its total cost is incurred there.
Nothing new per se but increasingly important also for Bond. I cannot say how accurate the Sun’s article about switching Liverpool for London is - but these tax schemes and kickbacks have been the backbone of the industry for some time. And will continue to do so in troubled years.
The Bond films start to underperform on German television as this German article analyzes.
One might point to their availability on Amazon etc. but free tv used to profit from interest in Bond.
As the article closes: it’s high time for the next film to moblize the younger audiences or the viewership is getting too old.
The analysis is to simplistic, a milkmaid’s calculation, so to say.
There’s been a vast overexposure of Bond movies on German TV in the past few years. ARD and the 3rd channels were the first to do this (especially as the 3rd channels have long ceased to be a local affair, as they’ve been on nationwide cable and satellite for years). And before their rights were running out, they broadcasted them away one last big time. Then came RTL and their associated channels and did the same, but much worse. What’s been going on recently was simply too much. At times, there were barely three days when there wasn’t a Bond movie on the (free) telly, with double features and re-runs in the late slots. Do they really think that showing LALD a dozen times within three weeks on three different channels will lead to better ratings?
And also, for decades, the German TV audience was used to Bond movies being free of commercial breaks. RTL’s 7 minute breaks every 35 minutes (if you’re lucky) aren’t exactly helpful for better ratings…
They did the same on Dutch television, this sounds so familiar to me.
I agree with that. At the moment we’re starting from zero again. We need to get people aware of the franchise and inside cinemas in the first place. But I think the inherent nature of James Bond (fast cars, gadgets, travel, etc) is exciting enough to draw in a younger demographic from any era. But it’s still not an easy thing to execute, and it’s going to be a higher stakes relaunch than GE or CR ever was.
Bond on free-tv in Germany has really been a mixed bag recently. While the public broadcasters deliver fairly well - minus cutting the end titles - anything on RTL/Pro7/Sat1 and their brethren is Entirely. Bloody. Unwatchable. People tuning in to a Bond film on RTL, even if it was a live feed of a world premiere, are likely busy doing four other things simultaneously, none of them any good. If the ratings are bad that’s probably a good thing for the film…
That said, it’s really high time there was some movement on BOND 26. If we assume that production may be ready sometime in 2027, hopefully, that’s the better part of a decade Bond hasn’t been around after wrapping production of NO TIME TO DIE.
Even counting from its 2021 premiere, young fans who came on board with that film - wonder how many? - are now in their late teens or early twenties. A whole generation of potential new fans never saw a new Bond film on the big screen. And these are the folks the series needs, the fresh blood for Amazon Or Nothing…
Did some basic research on this. Apparently, there’s some kind of agreement about a “Bond Season” each year among German (free) TV stations. In 2023, it went from June 9th to November 5th, which is 149 days. There were 76 Bond movies shown during in that timespan, which means more or less a Bond movie on every other day (average).
In 2024, it went from February 2nd to May 29th, 106 days, with 79 Bond movies. A Bond movie every 32 hours, less than a day and a half.
For 2025, we’re still into it (Skyfall again, yesterday, 3rd time this month). It started on January 9th, and in those 113 days until then we had 55 Bond movies on free TV. Again, one of them every two days.
On seven different channels (from three different networks), without Pay TV or streaming services.
And they wonder why the rates are going down?
I’m not familiar with the European viewing market, but what this sounds like to me is that the entertainment sector there were aware of an imminent sale of the franchise, years before what we publicly know now. So, they decided to get as much mileage out of Bond films as they can before Amazon locks them up for potentially higher viewing fees. Same for the EON side of it.
Even if the ratings crash from flooding the broadcast, it may be cheaper & more profitable to show Bond films now than for much longer in the future.
EON is Mr. Big right now, flooding the air with cheap Bond. Soon the face will switch to KanagAmazon, charging more for that valuable product?
European tv channels are roughly divided into public and private networks, both of them trying to offer a diverse spectrum of entertainment from shows, series, homemade productions and buying licensed material from Europe and the US market. Hollywood productions used to be a big deal and are still expensive when they first hit free tv. But since so many broadcasters compete for a shrinking audience they now usually try to make the most out of their limited licenses.
In Germany that means two private ‘networks’ (not really; they are closer to 24/7 commercial broadcasters with brief breaks for some form of programming) RTL and Pro7/Sat1 with four or five general channels each (and the odd special interest channel thrown into the mix) battle it out with two public service broadcasters and seven or eight ‘local’ channels.
They’ve all had at some time - or still have - Bond films and hold the rights to show them in various ways, whole or butchered into slices. And they’re all under pressure to make the most out of costly rights. It’s been like this for years already; not necessarily because they knew something we didn’t, but simply because the tv business has turned increasingly difficult against a demographic that’s now 24/7 online and whose attention span is challenged by social media, streamers, Instagram, YouTube and so on.
This environment has to have an impact on the ratings. 
I guess it’s all of it: overexposure (due to expiring licences), a younger generation not watching tv anyway, an older generation losing interest in films they have already seen too often, and the lack of new films which drive new interest.
Also, what is really „must see“ these days?
„A Minecraft Movie“.
This is the centre of the problem: there’s no common must-see event any more; it’s something different for various target groups. And that on top changes much faster than it used to. This week The Last of Us’ second episode might be water cooler topic (amongst streamer audiences, not amongst gamers who knew it would happen for years). It may be something different with club kids and it’s likely going to change by next Monday - if it hasn’t already.
‘Events’ are nowhere as far reaching as they used to be.
Given how often I’ve heard here and elsewhere how dreadful the theatre experience is, it’s hard to argue with that assessment…
While I have had dreadful theatre experiences, I think the reason people don’t want to go anymore is the diminishing of the value of watching movies in a cinema, a crime perpetrated by streamers and the smugness of people like Sarandos.
Nobody invests and can invest in theatres because streaming offers more movies for less money, thereby reducing the value of the „content“ to something you can watch without paying attention.
It’s the equivalent to malls with exchangeable franchises destroying small individual shops, claiming people prefer doing their shopping in one place.