It turns out they were right to kill off James Bond.
Three years ago, reviewing the final Daniel Craig Bond film, “No Time to Die,” I praised the filmmakers’ decision to end the movie with the death of Craig’s 007. I called it “the send-off he deserves” and wrote, “What happens in the climactic scene feels poetic: Bond, in a strange way, takes on the karma of all the people he has killed.” Of course, the film’s end title also assured us that “James Bond will return.” So he’s dead; and he’s coming back! I rationalized away the slight absurdity of this by figuring that they were killing off Craig’s 007 to make way for a new one — which, in essence, is what happens every time a different actor takes over the role.
Yet in the months after I wrote that review, as I absorbed the mountain of negative reaction triggered by the decision to kill off Bond, I rethought my original judgment. As time went on, I felt less good about what they had done. It appeared less “poetic” to me and more like an odd and enigmatic stunt.
Now, though, I may have to revise my revised opinion. Because it turns out that in 2021, killing off the James Bond we’d known and loved for 60 years — the ultimate spy, the ultimate movie icon of danger and cool and masculine mystique — may have been a more prescient move than anyone could have known.
The announcement today, that Amazon MGM Studios is set to assume creative control of the Bond franchise, and that the series’ longtime producers and overseers, Michael G, Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, will be stepping back, marks nothing less than a paradigm shift in movie culture. It’s a shift we’ve actually been in the thick of for a while — the transition from movies to content, from curated popcorn to popcorn sold by the yard. But the seismic nature of the Bond news today marks that transition as a cultural done deal.
In a universe of corporately controlled movie franchises, the Bond series felt like the last pure franchise. It was controlled not by a corporation, but by a family — the same way that the New York Times is controlled by a family, and is therefore able to exercise its free will as a journalistic entity outside the spectre (pun intended) of corporate control. These holdouts that remain major forces mean something big. They’re not just the exception that proves the rule. They’re the independent entities that make stretching the rules possible.
Barbara Broccoli, carrying on the tradition of her father, Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli (the original producer, along with Harry Saltzman, of the Bond films), has been a famous micromanager. As the driving force of the Broccoli-Bond empire, she maintained control over countless aspects of the Bond series, from the casting of Bond himself (a task she treated as if she were choosing the leader of the free world, which in a sense she was) to details like the car Bond drove, the weapons he used, the villains he faced, and whether he still preferred his martinis shaken, not stirred. Micromanagement can be a destructive thing, but in the case of the Bond series it meant that the films were curated, fussed over, cared about, and treated — always — as the mythological property they are. For more than six decades, every James Bond film has been an event. That’s part of their magic — that the Broccoli family figured out a complex strategy to sustain the series’ momentousness.
The Bond series was launched in 1962, with the release of “Dr. No,” and in all that time there have been only 25 James Bond films (actually, it’s 26 if you count the misbegotten, made-outside-of-EON-Productions “Never Say Never Again”). I love that it’s such a small number. One of the reported tensions between Amazon and Barbara Broccoli was that she was taking her sweet time in readying the next installment. (That’s part of the Broccoli strategy: Make ’em wait.) Amazon was itchy for product. I get it, but in that very itchiness you feel a harbinger of what Amazon might want to do.
In more than 60 years, a small handful of the Bond films have been great (my list: “Dr. No,” “Goldfinger,” “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” “Casino Royale”). A handful have been very good (“From Russia with Love,” “The Spy Who Loved Me”). A few are overrated (“You Only Live Twice,” though I love the volcano-lair climax, and “Skyfall” — sorry, but it’s way too “therapeutic” and derivative). At least one, in my opinion, is ritually underrated (“Die Another Day”). A few are total duds (“Live and Let Die,” “GoldenEye”). A number are just passable, and a number have aged badly. Yet here is a series — good, bad, or indifferent — that’s so unique it remains greater than the sum of its films.
What will happen to it now? I don’t have a crystal ball, but we sort of know what will happen. Now owned by a company, Amazon MGM, whose essential mission is to convert movies into streaming content, the Bond series will likely be “expanded,” spun off into sideline franchises (“The Reign of M,” “The Blofeld Chronicles,” “Young Bond: License to Drive”), maybe serialized, and generally milked. The same thing will happen to it that happened to the “Star Wars” franchise after George Lucas relinquished control of that to Disney: It will be expanded so much that it will, in an essential way, be watered down, and the more that that happens, the more the producers will scramble to make up for the mistakes they’ve made, which can only mean one thing: Even more content! Strip-mining the mystique. Killing the golden goose by exploiting it into oblivion.
One reason I’m all but certain this will happen is that the Bond series has already been living through a major identity crisis. Who will be the next Bond? That’s no longer just a question about finding an exciting actor who can rock that tux and do it with a charisma that feels not merely sexy, but lethal. (My vote, fwiw, is for Josh O’Connor.) It’s a question about who James Bond is. In recent years, there has been much debate about whether Bond is 1.) a relic of the Hugh Hefner era or 2.) an eternal human-sleuth superhero. We’ve seen countless headlines like “Does James Bond Have a Place in the Post-#MeToo World?” The truth is that Bond, as a character, was showing his age well before #MeToo. The old Bond Girl antics were really played out by the ’90s. (That’s one of many reasons why “Casino Royale” is so fantastic. It’s the one Bond film — ever — that’s truly an adult romance.) Should Bond be the haughty chauvinist of old or a new enlightened version? Should he be white or Black? Whoever’s in charge, all that needs to be figured out.
But do we trust the executives at Amazon with that mission? An article about the tensions between Amazon and the Broccoli family, published in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 19, 2024, quotes an “Amazon employee” as saying, “I have to be honest. I don’t think James Bond is a hero.” The article then says, “The room went silent.” The implication is that the person who said that was a crucial figure in the company. If that’s true, what does it say about where the James Bond series is going to go? There’s no question that the mystique of the character needs to evolve (as it always has), that Bond can’t simply be an action-and-martini museum piece. In many ways, what the series is known for — the stunts and gadgets, the global intrigue, the invincible Bond bravado — was long ago incorporated into other franchises, notably the “Mission: Impossible” series.
Yet the magic of Bond lingers. It’s a mythology in our culture that refuses to die, because moviegoers don’t want it to die. James Bond has proved that he can survive a great deal, even — in the last film — actually dying himself. My fear is that with a streaming giant in charge that understands the metrics of movies but not the underlying and in many ways subversive and fatalistic romance of them, we won’t see Bond die. What we’ll see is them killing him softly.
