Bond26 in 2025 and 007 to be "reinvented" says Babs Broccoli
Hi.
I had a look and I couldn't see a thread about what I thought was quite a big update for Bond fans.
Deadline got the scoop
My guess is reinventing Bond must mean going younger. Is it a coincidence we have that new video game coming out from the makers of Hitman? I think they need the audience to be a younger demographic for the franchise and video game tie ins and anything else for the youth market will be exploited with a younger Bond who begins as a Lt in the Royal Navy and somehow ends up at MI6.
I think this means all the candidates for the next Bond are wrong. It's someone who at the moment is probably in their early twenties. Lets not forget the first time Dalton was asked after Connery he was in his twenties and so was Henry Cavill. I think whomever they pick will still have that mix of TV and films experience but they have not had leading roles in major pics. Both Connery and Craig had those backgrounds, and you could argue Dalton was not a big name when he was picked.
With Bond26 as early as 2025, it looks like we'll have had ten years and only two Bond films. As much as I would like Martin Campbell to direct it, he is 78, one can only hope he is still able. Looking at IMDb he's certainly busy.
Comments
It has been discussed in the The Next James Bond Poll thread. The age of the actor is one of many ways Bond can be reinvented. Some of the actor's we have talked about are in their twenties, for example Jacob Elordi, and casting a younger Bond has certainly Bern a topic of discussion in the forum. It can also mean changing some of Bond's attitudes or behavior, his etnicity, the amount of humor in the movies, how much the series focuses on stunts, how much stuntwork the actor does himself etc.
We simply don't know what BB means by reinventing James Bond. Bond has been reinvented in a sense every time a new actor is cast as Bond. LTK and FYEO can also be called reiventions. Given the finale of NTTD the character has to to be reinvented in some way, but we don't know how or to what degree.
2025 also best case scenario - will be lucky to hit that in my opinion unless they start working right now
I think they will go back to Wilson and Maibaum's idea from TLD and make a story about Bond's early life. Does anyone have the treatment or know where we can read it?
Good god, we haven't had a traditional Bond adventure for twenty years. This needless experimentation and subversion has become more than tiresome. I couldn't care less about Bond's 'origin' - Dr. No began the cinematic Bond and wasted no time beating the audience over the head with Bond's childhood, early naval career and MI6 training.
Audiences know who James Bond is, we've spent the whole Craig era unnecessarily and arguably slapdashedly dissecting him. At this point, it would be a bold, brave move just to make a damn Bond film rather than this weird, unplanned soap opera featuring a character named 'James Bond'.
I don't know if the whole thing is online, but you can read synopses in the books The Making of The Living Daylights and The Lost Adventures of James Bond.
If you have a google for 'Burton Trevor 007' and 'Kwang' you might turn it up somewhere: those are two characters in it.
I found it online. Thanks for the pointers.
I think it be cool to see a Bond film where we meet him in his early 20's and joins MI6. In fact, it's the only untapped story I can see. The problem with the TLD script is that it has an older 007 in Burton Trevor. That character needs to be exorcised out of the script as Bond needs to go on the mission alone. You cannot have Bond playing second fiddle to another spy. I am sure there is a dramatic conceit which would allow Bond to still be in the SAS or military where he is working alone.
I personally do not want to see an ordinary Bond adventure where he goes on a conventional mission. That worked in the 60s, 70s and 80s but we are in a new era after Craig. I much prefer the more emotional and personal stories that BB and MGW have been making. The last thing I want is for them to go back to the 'old' model. I would actually rather they avoided making a lighthearted 'fun' film and instead continue in the same vein they are in at the moment with a younger Bond.
Here here
I think a number of factors suggest it won't go back to what we saw in the 80s and 90s.
With all that in mind, I'd be surprised if we don't get an SBS Lt Bond who is assigned to MI6, which is different to the way its been portrayed in the past, and we see Lt Bond become a Lt Cmdr and become 007 over more than one film. They probably need to get away from the ballad theme tunes to embrace the music millennials' like as they are the target audience. After 60 years, no one can expect endless remakes of The Spy who Loved Me.
I'm long of the view that Wilson and Broccoli won't be involved at all with the next film and will sell the business to Amazon by the middle of the decade. They reacquired Blofeld and Spectre and shoehorned them into the Craig era and killed off Bond. That looked like fulfilling a bucket list to me. Considering that Broccoli is tipping pension age and how sparse the movies have been the past 20 years, I don't see her overseeing an new Bonds tenure
Bond doesn't need to be reinvented so much as divested of all the baggage slung over him in the Craig era. Re-boot him with a simple re-make of the DN Connery/ Eunice Gayson scene in a casino and then let the film take off with stylish adventure and action.
A reinvented Bond needs a gunbarrel, a PTS, a title sequence, a title song to cue the movie's musical themes, M, Moneypenny, Q, a Flemingesque villain and a leading lady as lover. That shouldn't be tampered with - else why do Bond at all? why not simply do something else?
“Reintvention“ could go multiple ways:
1) Have the new Bond be of a different ethnicity, i.e. black, asian,…
2) Do a „Kingsman“: Bond is like Eggsy, freshly recruited and still in his youth
3) (my favorite): listening to the fandom and go for that
IG: @thebondarchives
Check it out, you won’t be disappointed
Listening to the fandom? Not their strong point, unfortunately.
I'm with Shady Tree (no surprise there).
Ideally what I'd like is for the next movie to simply pick up from the original 62-02 continuity, a stand alone adventure in which at the end while making out with the girl, Bond mentions past villans he has met like Odd-job, Goldfinger, Dr No and Max Zorin & Mayday but sadly I don't see that happening.
I think the next Bond should have a very lose continuity from Connery-Brosnan or start a new continuity.
If they go down that route then any hints should be very subtle- nothing like Bond finding familiar gadgets in Q's lab as was done in DAD, for example.
I agree.
If the tone of the next film matches that of the later Craig films, that’ll be it for me. Someone said above that they can’t keep remaking TSWLM. Well, it’s been 20 years since they made anything even resembling that. I think quite a few of us on this website could compose a better James Bond film than what we’re likely to get. All this talk about needing a young Bond with slick “millennial” or “Gen Z” vibes shows just how out of touch people are with what sells. The next Bond should be played by a millennial since the older millennials are now around 40! But take a look at Top Gun Maverick. Not exactly reinventing the wheel there, and people are going crazy over it.
Does doing what fans want ever lead to artistic greatness? Fans only ever want to see the same old thing, because they became fans of the old thing. And Bond has an audience way beyond fandom, it has general audience appeal, it doesn't seek to appeal to fans like Marvel or Star Wars does, because everyone watches Bond films.
Miles, you write that people are out of touch with what sells but Spectre is the fourth biggest grossing Bond of all time, adjusted for inflation. And No Time To Die grossed more than TSWLM, in a pandemic. In normal times it probably would have bested Spectre.
This is the lesson Studios learn including Amazon.
I had forgotten that IO Interactive's Project 007 game is to be a Bond origin story for a new Bond, not linked to Craig or past Bonds - those are IO's own words. I saw the other day that IO Interactive had announced an audio director for it. Can we expect to see a video game, comic book tie in for the new Bond movie? IO Interactive announced their Project 007 on 19 November 2020.
That would have seen the announcement during one of the cancelled release dates for NTTD. Interesting?
It takes at least 2 years to develop the Hitman games. The video game media were expecting news about Project 007 at this year's E3 convention but neither happened. Would it be helpful for a reinvented Bond if a 2025 new Bond movie had had a new Bond game come out in 2024?
I also find it interesting that while the Hitman producers have been chosen for a video game, this is the latest development in Dynamite's comic series - a Bond series with a 'focus on espionage and spycraft,' sound like a Hitman game to you? Dynamite's last Bond series 'lasted over 70 issues' says Screenrant.
https://screenrant.com/james-bond-new-comics-series-dynamite/
A year and seven months since Project 007 was announced, no gameplay pictures, nothing. I wonder to what degree, video game and comic book development is being influenced by the reinvention because of the importance of reaching a younger audience?
To me a younger Bond actor isn't mainly about attracting younger audiences. I want an actor who has the energy to make Bond movie every there years and his third one isn't about Bond getting old.
My “out of touch” comment was not directed towards EON, Spectre, or NTTD. It was directed at those who are suggesting that the next Bond must be in his 20s to attract a broader audience. I think that’s a fallacy. The next Bond just needs to be younger than Craig, who looked particularly ancient in NTTD and started playing a burned out agent a decade ago. No one questions the strong financial performance of the Craig films. But Brosnan’s movies performed well too, including DAD, and they still broke with convention and gave us something more akin to LTK. It was the right call. But now that’s started to feel a bit tired, so it’s time to swing back to a less serious take on Bond. Just my two cents.
As for the IO game, it won’t be a tie in. It’s an original story by design. IO pitched it as a concept and EON went for it, but IO is in charge of developing it, and were quite happy that EON didn’t require them to adhere to any particular film or version of Bond. And AAA titles like this routinely take years to develop even without a global pandemic sandwiched in between. I think 2025 seems about right for the game. We probably won’t get a look at it for another year. Which will still beat EON’s timetable for the next film!
I think "reinvention" needn't mean a new origin, simply a new approach. I've said over and over they need to wave in younger fans, and a reinvention might prioritize that, though again, I think it's a matter of tone and attitude and creating a four-quadrant experience, not necessarily a rewriting of the story or character.
Anyone coming in doing Craig 2.0 is going to be DOA - it would start of feeling stale, fatigued, and redundant. They need to put their chips on folks buying in on something new and different, not on a store-brand facsimile.
So love or hate Craig's run, don't expect a rehash.
You're right, @emtiem, of course.
Whatever happened to Cubby's philosophy of churning out a Bond move every other year ? The appple fell along way from the tree with that daughter of his.
HalfMonk HalfHitman said:
... creating a four-quadrant experience ...
I'm not familiar with this expression, what does it mean?
While I've said often here that this is what I'd like, I've also been told many times that this is not realistic these days and not to blame BB.
Well, not entirely anyhow.
I think four quadrant is a movie industry term related to demographics, each quadrant being a demographic, 16-24, 25-34, 35-54, 55+, I think.
Yes, I think The Batman can be called a 'reinvention', but tonally it's not all that hugely different to the Nolan Batman movies - it's just approached with a different eye. So it could even be quite similar in tone to the Craig movies, and yet still its own thing with new ideas etc.
The daughter who did exactly that with five movies? The another four within three years of each other, just like the gap Cubby had in the 70s, or the even bigger one he had at the end of the 80s.
Congrats to MI6hq which has some further info about Babs Broccoli's reinvention comments at the BFI event. Perhaps everyone here subscribes to the 'This Week in Bond' newsletter but if you don't (you can sign up here, box on right hand side of the front page of mi6-hq.com) this is the interesting bit:
[quote/] Less reported from the BFI event was a separate interview they [BB & MJW] gave to the Press Association about what the franchise means to them and the fans. Bond is a "classic hero," Broccoli said. "he is out not for his own personal benefit. He is out for Queen and country. He tries to do the best thing. He is very heroic, and I think people admire that and look up to that. He has some fun along the way, which people enjoy as well." [/quote]
I'd argue Craig's Bond was an emotional blunt instrument who did what he wanted. While Casino saw him carry out a mission, he quit near the end to go off with his lover for his own benefit, then in QoS he goes rogue, in Skyfall he unofficially quits after a near death experience (admittedly he comes back to help MI6), in Spectre he goes off on his own missions to avenge his M and then quits at the end of the film to go off with his lover, again. And in NTTD he only gets back into spying to help his pal Felix and to spite MI6 to some degree. He only goes back to MI6 to hunt whomever has destroyed Spectre because Felix is killed. Pretty selfish and not much Queen and country.
I think a lot of young people have naïve ideas about the world and being "out, not for his own personal benefit [but] for Queen and country... to do the best thing," is a perfect description for an ambitious young naval officer.
Considering the fiasco of a government the UK seems to have at the moment, I think 'growing up' and realising England is just as full of corruption as anywhere else would be a good character arc.