Whither 007, again?
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“Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.”
Last week Amazon announced “a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights” with MGM and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who had previously controlled the Bond film series. Lest that opening statement come across as too vague and businessy, the next sentence clarifies that Amazon “will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise.”
This news has been pretty roundly greeted with doomsaying. Amazon, after all, has previously dropped a billion to scrabble up rights to some of Tolkien’s work, resulting in “The Rings of Power.” Projects like this as well as Amazon’s general ethos fueled justifiable distrust on the part of Wilson and Broccoli, who briefly made the news a couple months ago, following a meeting with an Amazon exec who called Bond “content,” for describing Amazon leadership as “f—ing idiots.” But the “impasse” between Broccoli and Wilson and Amazon is at an end, something that cost Amazon a billion dollars. The heirs of Cubby Broccoli’s six-decade film series have been bought out, ousted. Wilson has stated clearly that he’s retiring while Broccoli has gestured toward working on “other projects.”
Some “joint venture.”
I’m pretty sure I’m in the doomsayers’ camp. Though every internet comment section on this story is full of people saying “What about ‘Reacher’?!” it should be indisputable that Amazon has a poor track record with literary adaptations and a well-deserved reputation for milking “IP” dry for “content.” That Deadline article offers the clearest reporting on this story when it describes Amazon spending that billion “to ensure that they could fully steer and exploit” Bond. And that’s not even to get into the woke Hollywood stuff that will inevitably intrude.
Indeed, it already has. Broccoli and Wilson might have guided the film series for decades but Ian Fleming’s estate still controls the books—and I use the word control deliberately. It was the estate’s official statement on the Amazon takeover that finally got me feeling something about all of this. After writing that the estate is “enormously excited about the next phase of the James Bond story on film under Amazon’s creative leadership,” whatever that mythical creature is, the statement praises the Broccoli family, who “have always respected the legacy of Ian Fleming and his words and his original depiction of Agent 007.”
This is pretty rich coming from the estate that has commissioned new books like On His Majesty’s Secret Service and Double or Nothing, which are not only tediously politically pandering but artistically weak, and that—most galling of all—authorized censorship of Fleming’s originals and moved to make sure only the bowdlerized versions are available. Fleming’s words—precisely what the estate praises Broccoli and Wilson for protecting.
Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I.
I have no particular loyalty to Broccoli and Wilson and have written in annoyance about them before, but to dedicate decades to the maintenance of a film project begun by their father is unique in a business governed by algorithm, merchandizing, profit margins, and the vicissitudes of political expediency. We shall not see their like again.
If you’re interested in some gossip about all of this, here’s a piece at the Daily Mail that claims to have scuttlebutt provided by an Amazon insider. For a more sober consideration of what all this means, pro and con, than what you’ll pick up from screechy YouTubers, I recommend this piece at IGN. And for an underrated former Bond’s opinion, let me conclude with a bit of Timothy Dalton’s reaction:
The movies have taken different courses over the years, but there is something very good about the original and I hope Amazon latch onto that and give us the kind of film that’s brought so much excitement and fun to so many people. . . . Anyway, good luck to them.
