Considering it took four years for Skyfall to see the light of day....
JohnMasterson
MinnesotaPosts: 326MI6 Agent
I hope the next two Bond movies are rushed faster into production than The Flash on a coke binge....Because that's the one thing I've hated about the James Bond series ever since it has fallen under Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson's control, the delays. I hate delays. I've hated the court delay that took place after Licence to Kill. I've hated the two years it took for Barbara and Michael to find a new Bond after they fired Pierce and I've hated the four year delay that happened because silly old MGM had financial problems that ended up inconveniencing me.
"Goodbye, my son. Our hopes and dreams travel with you." Jor-El ~ Man of Steel (2013)
Comments
Well, there was a six year gap in-between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye.
Ah, okay. Well, that one paid off alright.
Depends on who you ask.
Always
Was that two years or three years? Because I know it took them two years to find a new James Bond actor after they had fired Pierce Brosnan....
There is nothing more that the producers want than to release Bond movies on a regular basis. However, there are a few studios out there that pull all the strings; even when it concerns a Bond movie. Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson are kind and caring people, so give them a break.
This is what I assumed was the preferred release schedule. But I also don't have a certain source for thinking it.
Quick note here. It took me a long time to gather up my thoughts by the way. I'm not necessarily mad at Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson but I am mad at the situation because all of these delays seem to happen under Barbara and Michael's watch, now I know it's not their fault and it's just a run of bad luck but time is money in Hollywood and all of those lost years of James Bond not being on the silver screen is time and money lost...When it could have been spent entertaining the people. It almost seems like whenever there's a delay that fate is stepping in to keep another James Bond film from seeing the light of day because it's been like that ever since 1989. It's like having a film series that has gone on for this long, is going against the natural order of things and fate wants to step in, to restore the balance.
Knowing people in the industry and having been a filmmaker in the past, I can say that there are instances where production delays can sometimes make for a better film. However, in the case of these three Bonds, as far as I know none of the delays actually had anything to do with these films being any better in quality than they would have been. The scripts don't take that long to actually write and even the normal number of post finished script production meetings (where they figure out where to do locations and budgeting the sets and effects in relation to the script, etc). doesn't take long either. All these legal delays and corporate law p*ssing
contests and takeovers do is delay the shooting schedules. QOS's lack of quality (scripting, editing and directing) was the fault of the director and the writers. The director was not the right one to do a Bond film - he had no prior affiliation with the Bond franchise or previous films and just did not have the kind of pedigree that would qualify him for directing a Bond film. As far as the scripting, I'm afraid that when you have writers working as a team on a single screenplay, and each of them are writing at least one or more other screenplays at the same time, your going to have a lot of conflict and unfocused writing. I've seen it many times. Well, what about CR though. I'll tell you why that screenplay was superior to QOS and it wasn't because of the writers. It was because they had a superior writer helping them, and that was Ian Fleming. There was no Fleming material to help them on QOS, and that's another reason it suffered. In fact, if you look at the whole series, what films are always in the top lists? The ones that were close to Flemings stories or at least used a lot of his material. I touched on this subject in one of my other posts...unless the writers mine Flemings novels for unused scenes or even reuse scenes to use as a touchstone for the spine of their scripts, I'm afraid a lot of the future films will not be of great quality. Even the first half of CR, which was purely invented by the writing team, had really nothing to do with Bond, except for the two killings to become a 00 - and even those were not the way Bond did them in the novels. The first half of that film could have been a script for another Mission Impossible or any other action spy film - it was a number of action set pieces tied together with some scenes of Judi Dench being ticked off or explaining the plot, the villain showing off his credentials, and Craig snooping around some vacation spots. What made it great was the top notch acting - Craig in particular, and the whole story of Bond at the beginning of his career (Fleming, once again), memorable woman lead (Fleming's creation) and memorable villain (Fleming again). Back again to the heart of this post...film delays don't guarantee a production will be crafted with better care. From my experience and looking through the history of film, it more often means the final product ends up being far away from the original creative "spark" of the initial production setup because it creates fatigue amoung the whole production team - including the actors, who get frustrated and antsy and are always looking at the next job (or one they could be doing at the time). It also inflates the budget (which the money people are not happy so see), and in many cases ends up rushing the production to meet some deadline having to do with a seasonal release, which again hurts the quality of the finished film.