First of all: the UK isn't as full of corruption as everywhere else. The UK is among the dozen or so least corrupt countries in the world.
Becoming cynical about Britain is in my opinion more fitting for a John le Carre adaption, not James Bond.
Remember James Bond was invented and became a movie success while the empire disapeared. During the strikes, oil crisis and de-industrialization of the 70's they made the lighthearted Roger Moore movies. "Britain is sh*t, really" isn't the DNA of Bond. Fun, optimism and pride in the UK is.
I think a paranoid, cynical coming of age story is probably the very last thing I’d like to see. Plenty of that elsewhere. This is James Bond, for f*’s sake.
I'd argue Spectre had a corrupt UK plot line, a privately funded intelligence system whose manager, C, was in league with Spectre.
Skyfall saw M sell out Silva to further her aims. In NTTD, M is found to have had a genetic weapon development program off the books.
9/11 led to the decision to reinvent Bond which became the DC era. In recent years we have had liberal democratic values challenged and election interference from hostile powers. Recent events do influence Bond films, Goldeneye acknowledged the end of the Soviet Union. Craig said Trump was in NTTD, which I guess is when Bond says if MI6 and CIA aren't working together only bad can come of it.
Today, in a Parliament hearing, the Prime Minister of Britain admitted to meeting an ex-KGB (can you ever be ex?) agent without the presence of officials when he was the equivalent of the US Secretary of State.
Large parts of the press and the parliament are very negative towards PM and in many cases asks the PM to resign. A large and growing portion of the government has left in protest against the PM. None of these people have experienced "food poisoning" or unexplained arrests because of this. The PM is in real danger of having to resign. These are all signs that British democracy is in good health.
I guess the films haven't really dug into why Bond works and kills for his country: it's not especially clear if he even loves it or not (in the last few films he does seem to leave it as soon as he's out of the job on both occasions). That could be something you could look at I guess: maybe give him an origin story where he has to decide for himself where his loyalties lay and why.
I agree, I think deciding for himself where his loyalties lie and why is a good idea, especially if they make him a Fleming style aristocratic Bond and not DC blue collar Bond. Bond's dilemma could be, does he side with the ruling class that he was born into or does he side with the rule of law? His love of the Scooby gang could be the deciding factor.
I think unless they ignore the elephant in the room (NTTD ending) by just carrying on with a new actor in good old fashioned James Bond style, using the 007 codename theory, or brushing it off with a "this never happened to the other fellow" line in the PTS, the only way to go is with an origin story with an actor in his mid twenties. There's less argument then of "how can James Bond be back, when he died in the last one?" People may find it easier to accept and comprehend, this is Bond before, at the start. I know, the timeline and continuity is completely screwed and it will still be quite awkward, but deliver a good actor with a good script, story, action and locations, then the majority of general movie goers and JB fans will be happy.
Yeah I wouldn't mind a different take on an origin story. You could deal more with Bond's pre-MI6 life in the special forces and DI; explore exactly why he chooses to kill for the Queen; potentially even show the formation of the Double 0 section - have M approach him as the very first double-0. I quite liked the way Deaver rethought the MI6 setup in his novel, something like that could be good. And it is perhaps a little silly to have M as the head of the entire secret service, briefing agents in person- perhaps he should just be the boss of the double 0s, maybe out of the way of the rest of MI6.
Maybe even rethink Bond's relationship with MI6- rather than going to the office every day and back to his flat, perhaps he should be a sort of deep cover asset, always living the life of a playboy on the Riveria etc. and just activated when needed. Have his entire life taken over by his job: does he still enjoy the trappings of luxury or is he trapped?
You could argue that half of NTTD was Bond's life outside MI6 but the film titles still had DC playing Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 so I think any actor playing Bond prior to the 00 section can still be called Ian Fleming's James Bond 007. I don't think we'll see a Bond origin story where the 00 section is created and Bond's its first assassin. I did think a big creative opportunity was missed with Casino when more wasn't made of Bond's two kills.
I don't see any reason at all for using the code name theory. I think using that theory would be the death of the series. Do what they did in CR again and start a new timeline. While I'm not completely against another origin story, I don't want that. I'd like to see James Bond in Bond26 as an active and experienced 00-agent.
I agree with emtiem that M should have a less active role in the future. Maybe having Moneypenny present the missions for the 00-agents would be one way of reinventing Bond? M gives the order, Moneypenny presents the mission? Tanner and Leiter are the ones Bond usually is involved with in the field.
M could be in the new River House as le Carre calls it, and the 00-section and Q Branch is in the traditional MI6 building from the old movies?
I can't imagine EON ever going for the code-name theory. But no doubt some moron at Amazon would think it was a good idea, fortunately they have no creative input.
Thinking about reinvention and the four quadrants, I think we could see the following to appeal to them.
The return of gadgets, after few gadgets in DC's films, for that young tech savvy male or female, good gadgets. Maybe have a young female Q.
A good new car, not the DB5, to appeal to both male quadrants and some women.
Strong military presence for Bond's background, Royal Navy etc, to appeal to both male quadrants.
More action than Casino, for example, for the young male quadrant.
Bond women who can be older than Bond and still be appealing to young women (Kate Beckinsale) and the older female quadrant.
The return to the good girl and bad girl to up the number of women characters. Moneypenny could be made a man to balance it out.
Those good and bad Bond women on their own mission, more Camille Montes and Fiona Volpe than Mary Goodnight and Miranda Frost. Bad girl doesn't have to die.
Some sort of relationship Bond has with the good girl, doesn't have to be like Tracy and Madeleine, but it should be less Camille Montes and more Paloma. Mutual attraction, competition, flirting. This is for female quadrants, Think Phoebe Waller Bridger.
A return to the classic structure, if possible, Bond on a mission after Act one, detective Bond sleuths his way to villain's lair, escapes to end Act two and Bond returns to said lair for the final act and a big climatic explosion - for the older male quadrant.
A country other than Italy. DC went there one too many times. OK this is for me, not a quadrant.
On the subject of a new Bond's motivations. A contemporary setting would inevitably see Bond repeatedly kicking against the Establishment. That's all part of what a genre hero is now - in a generally less deferential era than when Bond was first adapted to the cinema. Craig's Bond tends to pull against MI6, or away from it, with a more personal agenda, before repeatedly and grudgingly returning to the fold; tensions along similar lines are there in Dalton's and Brosnan's Bond movies, too.
Albeit frequently depressed, Fleming's Bond, on the other hand, had a largely more straightforward sense of patriotic duty, representative of a stoical generation which had served during the Second World War. Only in the final arc of novels, from OHMSS to TMWTGG, was Bond's raison-d'etre severely tested, yet still he came through as a fundamentally heroic servant of the Crown. That post-war St George syndrome translated readily to the early Bond films, even though the idea of Bond 'thinking of England' was increasingly rendered tongue-in-cheek against the context of hedonism and consumerism associated with the swinging sixties. The finale of NTTD is an attempt to plug Craig's Bond emphatically back into a traditional code of honour, reinforcing an idea about him that he had never really "left".
For me, as I've said before, I'd like to see the next cycle of Bond films set in the 50s and 60s. That's so we can get back to a sense of Bond's patriotic post-war mettle, in a fantasy iteration of a past era blighted by the Cold War but at a 'safe' remove from the geopolitical shockwaves and radical insecurities of our contemporary reality. At least that might mean we could have a run of Bond films in which Bond isn't continually pulling against or away from the home team. I'm not writing as an arch-conservative or as a One Nation Tory, by the way - just as a traditional Bond fan who suspects that the formula I'm suggesting would have a broad appeal across different demographics. But if the need for product placement scuppers this idea, expect another contemporary Bond to be drawn to repeated variations on being "out on his own and out for revenge" - with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Yeah I'm not even that sure Fleming entirely explained Bond's sense of patriotic duty beyond just a general sense of morality: he certainly seemed to prefer not being in England wherever possible, and seemed in a way to be doing his job mostly for himself and to sate his sort of addiction to danger and excitement - he even got withdrawal symptoms when not out on missions; the recurring 'accidie'. I remember reading Christopher Wood's Spy Who Loved Me novelisation and, writing in a sort of Flemingish manner, he has Bond look out of the window of M's office over London, which he described as something like 'this England which he loved', and I remember it really jarring: that affection just didn't seem right in Bond's head at all.
I don't mind Bond not following orders slavishly: it makes for conflict and that's the source of drama. As you say, 100% of Timothy Dalton's Bond films featured him disobeying M's orders.
The last Mission Impossible actually did a rather lovely, almost postmodern take on this, where Hunt is confronted by his boss for going AWOL and pretty much taken off the case, and Hunt has to then mutiny against his boss. Fairly familiar stuff, but the lovely spin on it was that they were all putting on a show to draw out the real mole in their midst - Hunt and his boss were always on the same side and following the plan throughout!
I think we could see less disobeying of orders. While Deadline quoted Babs Broccoli as saying: "We’re working out where to go with him, we’re talking that through. There isn’t a script and we can’t come up with one until we decide how we’re going to approach the next film because, really, it’s a reinvention of Bond. We’re reinventing who he is and that takes time."
I think we got a lot off information from BB's next quote, from MI6HQ's post about the Press Association report where she says: "Bond is a "classic hero, 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."
I'm surprised nothing leaked from this event. I would imagine Purvis and Wade are helping reinvent Bond.
With a contemporary setting I'd expect the return of the Russians as the enemy with current events. They were in the 1960s, along with the threat of communist China. Nixon's 'war on drugs' was reflected in LALD, the energy crisis of the 1970s in TMWTGG, fears about US nuclear weapons on European soil in Octopussy, the rise of microelectronics in AVTAK, Russia's war in Afghanistan in TLD, the South American cartels in LTK, the fall of the Soviet Union in GE, the power of satellite news channels in TND, and the growing threat of North Korea in DAD.
Maybe Bond26 will see 007 up against something like the Wagner Group in some exotic part of the world, to reference Russia's overt belligerence?
I don't think Russia will be James Bond's the enemy in future, much like the conflict with the USSR was the backdrop of many Bond movies and not the enemy. The enemy was apolitical individual and organisations, but the political situation was acknowledged. I think this is the way forward too.
Red China was lurking behind the scenes in a number of early Bonds, sponsoring both Goldfinger and the Blofeld of YOLT, and leasing an island to Scaramanga in return for an occasional favour. The USSR was behind Krilencu in FRWL, sponsored Kristatos in FYEO and was a source of corrupt or rogue elements in other films.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,746Chief of Staff
The franchise needs to be "reinvented" in a manner to appeal to younger audiences. Honestly, the best approach is to steer dramatic away from the style of filmmaking in the The Gray Man (which was basically a subpar 'Bourne meets Fast & Furious' film) and go for a style demonstrated in the trailer for HBO's The Idol. This is the Bond 26 I want.
Comments
aha, I see, its about the audience. Is that right @HalfMonk HalfHitman ?
a bit of googling and I found this article and graphic...
... so its about females as much as young vs old, and that's a problem for our Bond films too: they're very much a male fantasy
First of all: the UK isn't as full of corruption as everywhere else. The UK is among the dozen or so least corrupt countries in the world.
Becoming cynical about Britain is in my opinion more fitting for a John le Carre adaption, not James Bond.
Remember James Bond was invented and became a movie success while the empire disapeared. During the strikes, oil crisis and de-industrialization of the 70's they made the lighthearted Roger Moore movies. "Britain is sh*t, really" isn't the DNA of Bond. Fun, optimism and pride in the UK is.
I think a paranoid, cynical coming of age story is probably the very last thing I’d like to see. Plenty of that elsewhere. This is James Bond, for f*’s sake.
hell of a day to defend the UK and suggest we're not in decline...Knighthood is in the post! 😁
I'd argue Spectre had a corrupt UK plot line, a privately funded intelligence system whose manager, C, was in league with Spectre.
Skyfall saw M sell out Silva to further her aims. In NTTD, M is found to have had a genetic weapon development program off the books.
9/11 led to the decision to reinvent Bond which became the DC era. In recent years we have had liberal democratic values challenged and election interference from hostile powers. Recent events do influence Bond films, Goldeneye acknowledged the end of the Soviet Union. Craig said Trump was in NTTD, which I guess is when Bond says if MI6 and CIA aren't working together only bad can come of it.
Today, in a Parliament hearing, the Prime Minister of Britain admitted to meeting an ex-KGB (can you ever be ex?) agent without the presence of officials when he was the equivalent of the US Secretary of State.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-62068421
The positive side could be the reinvented new young Bond vanquishing the corrupt old bad apples of the UK govt.
🤣🤣🤣
🤣
This is how I see it:
Large parts of the press and the parliament are very negative towards PM and in many cases asks the PM to resign. A large and growing portion of the government has left in protest against the PM. None of these people have experienced "food poisoning" or unexplained arrests because of this. The PM is in real danger of having to resign. These are all signs that British democracy is in good health.
Apparently he is refusing to resign, despite several Cabinet members advising him to do so.
He doesn't have to resign yet, legally. The system is working.
However, we have wandered well off-topic!
I don't think we should read too much into BB's "reinvention" comment. As ever, we have to wait and see.
I agree with Calvin Dyson om this. What would be surprising and worrying was if BB said they won't change thing!
I guess the films haven't really dug into why Bond works and kills for his country: it's not especially clear if he even loves it or not (in the last few films he does seem to leave it as soon as he's out of the job on both occasions). That could be something you could look at I guess: maybe give him an origin story where he has to decide for himself where his loyalties lay and why.
I agree, I think deciding for himself where his loyalties lie and why is a good idea, especially if they make him a Fleming style aristocratic Bond and not DC blue collar Bond. Bond's dilemma could be, does he side with the ruling class that he was born into or does he side with the rule of law? His love of the Scooby gang could be the deciding factor.
I think unless they ignore the elephant in the room (NTTD ending) by just carrying on with a new actor in good old fashioned James Bond style, using the 007 codename theory, or brushing it off with a "this never happened to the other fellow" line in the PTS, the only way to go is with an origin story with an actor in his mid twenties. There's less argument then of "how can James Bond be back, when he died in the last one?" People may find it easier to accept and comprehend, this is Bond before, at the start. I know, the timeline and continuity is completely screwed and it will still be quite awkward, but deliver a good actor with a good script, story, action and locations, then the majority of general movie goers and JB fans will be happy.
Yeah I wouldn't mind a different take on an origin story. You could deal more with Bond's pre-MI6 life in the special forces and DI; explore exactly why he chooses to kill for the Queen; potentially even show the formation of the Double 0 section - have M approach him as the very first double-0. I quite liked the way Deaver rethought the MI6 setup in his novel, something like that could be good. And it is perhaps a little silly to have M as the head of the entire secret service, briefing agents in person- perhaps he should just be the boss of the double 0s, maybe out of the way of the rest of MI6.
Maybe even rethink Bond's relationship with MI6- rather than going to the office every day and back to his flat, perhaps he should be a sort of deep cover asset, always living the life of a playboy on the Riveria etc. and just activated when needed. Have his entire life taken over by his job: does he still enjoy the trappings of luxury or is he trapped?
You could argue that half of NTTD was Bond's life outside MI6 but the film titles still had DC playing Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 so I think any actor playing Bond prior to the 00 section can still be called Ian Fleming's James Bond 007. I don't think we'll see a Bond origin story where the 00 section is created and Bond's its first assassin. I did think a big creative opportunity was missed with Casino when more wasn't made of Bond's two kills.
I don't see any reason at all for using the code name theory. I think using that theory would be the death of the series. Do what they did in CR again and start a new timeline. While I'm not completely against another origin story, I don't want that. I'd like to see James Bond in Bond26 as an active and experienced 00-agent.
I agree with emtiem that M should have a less active role in the future. Maybe having Moneypenny present the missions for the 00-agents would be one way of reinventing Bond? M gives the order, Moneypenny presents the mission? Tanner and Leiter are the ones Bond usually is involved with in the field.
M could be in the new River House as le Carre calls it, and the 00-section and Q Branch is in the traditional MI6 building from the old movies?
I can't imagine EON ever going for the code-name theory. But no doubt some moron at Amazon would think it was a good idea, fortunately they have no creative input.
Thinking about reinvention and the four quadrants, I think we could see the following to appeal to them.
Agreeing with everything exept no. 6:
Moneypenny mustn‘t be a man…we have Tanner, Robinson and Villiers for that (the latter two of course with sone eye-wink).
IG: @thebondarchives
Check it out, you won’t be disappointed
I agree with AugustWalker.
Agree with your comment about Deaver. That was a proper “reinvention” of Bond for the modern age, and one that EON would do well to emulate.
On the subject of a new Bond's motivations. A contemporary setting would inevitably see Bond repeatedly kicking against the Establishment. That's all part of what a genre hero is now - in a generally less deferential era than when Bond was first adapted to the cinema. Craig's Bond tends to pull against MI6, or away from it, with a more personal agenda, before repeatedly and grudgingly returning to the fold; tensions along similar lines are there in Dalton's and Brosnan's Bond movies, too.
Albeit frequently depressed, Fleming's Bond, on the other hand, had a largely more straightforward sense of patriotic duty, representative of a stoical generation which had served during the Second World War. Only in the final arc of novels, from OHMSS to TMWTGG, was Bond's raison-d'etre severely tested, yet still he came through as a fundamentally heroic servant of the Crown. That post-war St George syndrome translated readily to the early Bond films, even though the idea of Bond 'thinking of England' was increasingly rendered tongue-in-cheek against the context of hedonism and consumerism associated with the swinging sixties. The finale of NTTD is an attempt to plug Craig's Bond emphatically back into a traditional code of honour, reinforcing an idea about him that he had never really "left".
For me, as I've said before, I'd like to see the next cycle of Bond films set in the 50s and 60s. That's so we can get back to a sense of Bond's patriotic post-war mettle, in a fantasy iteration of a past era blighted by the Cold War but at a 'safe' remove from the geopolitical shockwaves and radical insecurities of our contemporary reality. At least that might mean we could have a run of Bond films in which Bond isn't continually pulling against or away from the home team. I'm not writing as an arch-conservative or as a One Nation Tory, by the way - just as a traditional Bond fan who suspects that the formula I'm suggesting would have a broad appeal across different demographics. But if the need for product placement scuppers this idea, expect another contemporary Bond to be drawn to repeated variations on being "out on his own and out for revenge" - with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.
Yeah I'm not even that sure Fleming entirely explained Bond's sense of patriotic duty beyond just a general sense of morality: he certainly seemed to prefer not being in England wherever possible, and seemed in a way to be doing his job mostly for himself and to sate his sort of addiction to danger and excitement - he even got withdrawal symptoms when not out on missions; the recurring 'accidie'. I remember reading Christopher Wood's Spy Who Loved Me novelisation and, writing in a sort of Flemingish manner, he has Bond look out of the window of M's office over London, which he described as something like 'this England which he loved', and I remember it really jarring: that affection just didn't seem right in Bond's head at all.
I don't mind Bond not following orders slavishly: it makes for conflict and that's the source of drama. As you say, 100% of Timothy Dalton's Bond films featured him disobeying M's orders.
The last Mission Impossible actually did a rather lovely, almost postmodern take on this, where Hunt is confronted by his boss for going AWOL and pretty much taken off the case, and Hunt has to then mutiny against his boss. Fairly familiar stuff, but the lovely spin on it was that they were all putting on a show to draw out the real mole in their midst - Hunt and his boss were always on the same side and following the plan throughout!
I think we could see less disobeying of orders. While Deadline quoted Babs Broccoli as saying: "We’re working out where to go with him, we’re talking that through. There isn’t a script and we can’t come up with one until we decide how we’re going to approach the next film because, really, it’s a reinvention of Bond. We’re reinventing who he is and that takes time."
I think we got a lot off information from BB's next quote, from MI6HQ's post about the Press Association report where she says: "Bond is a "classic hero, 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."
I'm surprised nothing leaked from this event. I would imagine Purvis and Wade are helping reinvent Bond.
With a contemporary setting I'd expect the return of the Russians as the enemy with current events. They were in the 1960s, along with the threat of communist China. Nixon's 'war on drugs' was reflected in LALD, the energy crisis of the 1970s in TMWTGG, fears about US nuclear weapons on European soil in Octopussy, the rise of microelectronics in AVTAK, Russia's war in Afghanistan in TLD, the South American cartels in LTK, the fall of the Soviet Union in GE, the power of satellite news channels in TND, and the growing threat of North Korea in DAD.
Maybe Bond26 will see 007 up against something like the Wagner Group in some exotic part of the world, to reference Russia's overt belligerence?
I don't think Russia will be James Bond's the enemy in future, much like the conflict with the USSR was the backdrop of many Bond movies and not the enemy. The enemy was apolitical individual and organisations, but the political situation was acknowledged. I think this is the way forward too.
Red China was lurking behind the scenes in a number of early Bonds, sponsoring both Goldfinger and the Blofeld of YOLT, and leasing an island to Scaramanga in return for an occasional favour. The USSR was behind Krilencu in FRWL, sponsored Kristatos in FYEO and was a source of corrupt or rogue elements in other films.
Perhaps…but the book is bloody awful 🫣
True. But the political was always the backdrop and not the real enemy to me. You know how I hate talking about politics. 😁
Yes, we're talking about the modernisation of MI6/Double 0s in it though, which was good.
The franchise needs to be "reinvented" in a manner to appeal to younger audiences. Honestly, the best approach is to steer dramatic away from the style of filmmaking in the The Gray Man (which was basically a subpar 'Bourne meets Fast & Furious' film) and go for a style demonstrated in the trailer for HBO's The Idol. This is the Bond 26 I want.
https://twitter.com/FilmUpdates/status/1548687004170330114