“James Bond will return”says the now classic legend printed at the end of the credits of each new film of the most famous secret agent in the world. It also appears before the screen goes blank on closing. No time to die (No Time to Die), the last known 007 film so far, released on November 30, 2021.
A few hours ago, that phrase stopped being an unquestionable statement and became the most disturbing question for millions of fans around the world. Will James Bond return? At this point there are reasons to be quite pessimistic about this. The future of the most popular name on a planetary scale to emerge from cinema until the arrival of Harry Potter is a gigantic unknown. 62 years and 25 movies passed. Has the entire story of 007 already been written?
The fate of James Bond is in the hands of two partner organizations since 2021 for the management of that brand. Today they remain faced in the midst of differences so irreconcilable that they can seriously condition the future of the character in the cinemaas revealed in an extensive research note just published by The Wall Street Journal.
On one side are Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, children of the legendary Albert R. Broccoli, the producer who was behind Bond from day one (the initial film was released on October 5, 1962). They are the current owners of EON Productions, responsible for three decades of safeguarding the Bond brand and making every creative decision about the character.
On the other comes Amazon, the e-commerce giant, which in 2021 paid $8.5 billion to purchase Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a name with a great history in the Hollywood industry, and immediately secured the great jewel of its catalog: the 25 films starring James Bond between 1962 and the present, today available in their entirety on Amazon's streaming platform, Prime Video.
Thanks to that same operation, Amazon also became the owner of half of EON, but Broccoli and Wilson made sure to impose a clause in the agreement whereby the duo maintains complete control of the creative decisions and fate of the character.. As of today, Amazon is inhibited from carrying out any new official 007 project without the explicit endorsement and direct participation of the duo, who continue to have the last word.
The disagreement between the two does not seem to have any turning back for now. “The relationship between the family that oversees the brand and the e-commerce giant practically collapsed. This deteriorating partnership has dashed any short-term hopes of seeing a Bond movie.“, states the journalistic report published this Saturday in the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal.
The axis of the dispute, according to the New York newspaper, concerns nothing more and nothing less than the future of Bond and the scope of the use and exploitation of the brand. Apparently, Amazon would like to give the popular British spy a fate similar to that of any other popular figure emerging from the screen. In addition to the films, we would be thinking, for example, of possible series in which secondary characters very familiar to the Bond universe (Moneypenny? M? Q?) become protagonists of their own adventures. The idea of a broad and comprehensive use could even include the installation of an online casino themed around the movies.
Broccoli, according to all the testimonies consulted, does not want to have anything to do with Amazon's algorithms nor with the majority of non-cinema Bond projects. For her and her half-brother, Bond belongs on the big screen and that is the only feasible place for any future adventures.. Until now, they have only authorized, outside of the cinema, the reality show 007 Heading to the millionin which nine couples compete to win a million pounds sterling by completing challenges inspired by Bond films. There are already two complete seasons available on Prime Video.
The Wall Street Journal says that Broccoli has been confessing to some friends that he does not trust Amazon at all. “These people are fucking idiots“, is the phrase said in private that functions as a summary of what he thinks about the current owners of the 007 catalog. Apparently, the sayings reached the ears of Amazon executives and ended up breaking the flimsy bridges that held the company up to that point. relationship between both parties.
Broccoli and Wilson, according to the more than 20 testimonies consulted by The Wall Street Journal, distrusted from the beginning the agreement with a brand outside of entertainment and film production as its primary activity. Therefore, when they accepted the agreement that allowed the purchase of MGM (and its valuable catalog) by Amazon, they secured a kind of veto right. They feel like custodians of a historical brand.
The arrival of executive Jennifer Salke to a position of great influence and decision-making power in Amazon's plans for films and series through MGM complicated things even more. According to The Wall Street Journal, The executive represents a line that understands Bond as “content” open to different perspectives and formats. On the other hand, Broccoli and Wilson firmly believe that Bond stayed alive for six decades because he always avoided falling into excess or saturating the viewer with too many things at the same time.
“I have to be honest. “I don't think James Bond is a hero,” said an anonymous Amazon employee quoted in The Wall Street Journal article, which also mentions meetings in which the possibility of the character acquiring a new appearance, including changing his appearance, would have been discussed. gender, ethnicity and even sexual identity. Broccoli and Wilson don't want to know anything about it: they have flatly said that Bond will never be a woman and that he must be from somewhere in the British Commonwealth. They do not have, however, racial objections. We can imagine from now on, from that perspective, a mixed-race or black Bond.
This entire complex panorama overshadows the expectation of revealing the name of Daniel Craig's successor in a relatively short period of time. And it further rarifies a panorama that had changed very recently. Before the revelations of The Wall Street Journal, a note by The Hollywood Reporter on the most important predictions for the world of entertainment in 2025 announced without hesitation that Josh O'Connor was going to be the new James Bond, the seventh in the history of the character after Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Craig.
That prediction about O'Connor definitively put an end to a rumor that was sustained this year for several months and acquired dubious certainty in the pages of the British newspaper The Sun, a model of the yellow press in its country. Last March, that medium specialized in sensational police news assured that the one chosen by the Broccoli-Wilson tandem had been Aaron Taylor-Johnson, one of the fashionable actors, protagonist of Kraven the hunter and key figure of the new version of Nosferatupremiere on January 2 in Argentine cinemas.
In our country we know O'Connor, 34 years old (the same age as Taylor-Johnson), especially for having played Prince Charles in two seasons of the series The Crown. We also saw it recently in Challengingby Luca Guadagnino, and will reappear in The chimeraby Alice Rohrwacher, which was also scheduled for theatrical release on January 2.
Beyond any name, the future remains shrouded in a gigantic unknown. “We are reinventing James Bond and that takes time. I would say that we are at least two years away from starting to film the next movie,” Barbara Broccoli had said in June 2022. Those deadlines were extended and seem to have reached a stalemate today. Today, the 26th James Bond film has no script, no possible story behind it, and much less a protagonist.
The honorary Oscar that Broccoli and Wilson received from the Hollywood Academy on November 17 did not help either. Many thought at that time that such recognition was going to be the perfect excuse to announce the name of the next James Bond. That did not happen, and more than one memory lover remembered instead that we are not for the first time faced with the case of such a long wait to announce who the new face of 007 will be. No less than six years passed between Dalton's departure in 1989 and the arrival of Pierce Brosnan as a true savior. Now we have gone a little over three years without anything new.
In the midst of that long transition between Dalton and Brosnan, it was thought and said for the first time that the story of James Bond in the cinema was over forever. Will the current dispute between Broccoli and Amazon be the second? The fans don't want to hear it. They prefer to return to a phrase that has the power of a talisman. They continue to trust, as the legend written at the end of each film says, that James Bond will return.
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