How James Bond Can Be Reinvigorated By Amazon MGM

Amazon controls Bond, James Bond. The question is, what comes next in this new era for 007?

James Bond By the Numbers

Amazon owns MGM Studios, MGM Studios owns the right to distribute James Bond movies, and earlier this year Amazon MGM officially gained creative control over the Bond franchise from Eon Productions owners/producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.

Denis Villeneuve is on board as director of the next installment to the James Bond series, with a 2028 release in mind. The director already has Dune: Messiah and Nuclear War: A Scenario on his dance card, so it’s not clear how soon his Bond will get underway. Whenever it is, he’s a spectacular filmmaker and should do great things for MI5’s favorite agent.

James Bond films have grossed more than $7.87 billion at the worldwide box office, off 27 total movies, including Never Say Never Again’s $160 million in 1983 as a standalone Bond movie separate from the official franchise.

Actor Daniel Craig’s five-film $3.97 billion-grossing Bond run had a $794 million per-film average that’ll be tough to match: Martin Campbell’s 2006 Casino Royale at $616.5 million; Marc Foster’s 2008 Quantum of Solace at $585 million; Sam Mendes’ 2012 Skyfall at $1.1 billion; Mendes’ 2015 Spectre at $880.7; and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time To Die $774 million.

Amazon would be hard pressed to get a new James Bond film written, cast, filmed, and released before 2027. That means at least a six-year hiatus between films, matching the longest previous stretch between 007 pictures back when 1989’s License to Kill brought the Timothy Dalton era to a sudden close in 1989, leading to delays and lawsuits resulting in GoldenEye’s 1991 release date and starting the Pierce Brosnan era.

Brosnan took over Bond at a period of dramatic global political change, as the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union no longer existed. Spread of weapons of mass destruction and rogue states came to the forefront of fears and spy entertainment, and Bond adjusted accordingly.

Today, we face extreme political change and unrest, as well as a turn back toward many aspects of the Cold War. But there are also new emerging threats, including AI and cyberterrorism and the threat of infiltration of democratic governments by spies of NATO’s hostile enemies.

There is also a significantly evolving landscape at the box office, with family-focused filmmaking dominating blockbuster box office charts and major franchises failing left and right.

Adult action fare can still perform well, as One Battle After Another and even bigger players like F1: The Movie demonstrate. But Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a cautionary tale that legacy action tentpoles relying on adult audiences have to find ways to stay relevant and reinvent themselves or suffer inevitable diminishing returns.

The Many Worlds Of James Bond

I think the smartest business move for the 007 franchise would be to do standalone trilogies around visionary filmmaker and actor pairings, changing filmmakers and actors to start over with each trilogy. That would mean Villeneuve would be asked to commit to two sequels to his upcoming reboot, and his lead signed to a three-picture deal, for example.

Separately, Amazon Prime could do a longform James Bond streaming series adapting the stories, starting from Casino Royale and continuing with a new story each season – but with the same cast, to maintain a continuity and canon that becomes the new official ongoing Bond timeline. They could also do a few spinoff series, perhaps one about the founding of MI5, one around M’s own backstory, and one about the origins of the villainous organization and bane of Bond’s existence SPECTRE.

That approach maximizes potential for blockbuster box office payoffs. By doing trilogies, they don’t have to commit to longer contracts every time, so budgets won’t spiral. Additionally, the longer a given set of films continues, the more they seem to either repeat themselves or trip while trying to one-up themselves.

This also allows more experimentation in the films, since they’re in three-film sets that don’t form a single canonical history. We could get a Christopher Nolan trilogy set in the 1960s done in the style of British spy thrillers of the era, a 1980s Cold War spy-thriller trilogy from Kathryn Bigelow, and a modern action spy trilogy from Susanne Bier (and starring Dev Patel as Bond, for my own personal favorite casting and directing pair at the moment). And they could put the first film of a new trilogy into production at the same time as, or in close proximity to, the production of the final film of another trilogy, to prevent extended time between trilogies.

The streaming series, meanwhile, develops dedicated longterm fans and introduces them into the broader storytelling across the other mediums. A high-quality show about Bond would be capable of retaining regular yearly viewership to further expand the total global audience for Bond. It comes with a lower bar for success in terms of size of viewership due to the inherent differences for TV and streaming. That’s a bar James Bond’s franchise could easily meet and best.

And of course, the studio can launch new canonical novels (exclusive to Amazon during initial release, for example) around the series to reset the official expanded universe of books within the new streaming series continuity. Same with comics. And establish a separate world of novels and a separate world of comics, giving fans multiple various approaches and worlds of James Bond to enjoy and choose from.

I can understand and appreciate the way Marvel’s shared universe extends from the films to their streaming series, and likewise appreciate the new DCU’s streaming shows crossing over in the same world with their feature films.

However, I feel putting them all into one world misses some great multi-pronged storytelling opportunities. Film, streaming, novels, and comics offer separate shared-world opportunities. Amazon could court great artists and storytellers to sign up for exclusive contracts and get their hands on one of the biggest properties in the world, with creative freedom to “build their own Bond,” so to speak.

After Villeneuve completes a trilogy with someone like Jacob Elordi or Anthony Boyle for example, maybe we could watch performers like Dev Patel, Henry Cavill, and John Boyega each as James Bond in movie trilogies from directors like Ryan Coogler, Kathryn Bigelow, and Christopher Nolan. We could see Joseph Quinn play Bond in a live-action streaming series directed by Susanne Bier, and hear Tatiana Maslany voice Jane Bond for an animated series directed by James Oliva. We could read 007 novel series penned by Gillian Flynn, as well as comics written by Greg Rucka, Gail Simone, and Ed Brubaker. These are obviously just hypothetical examples, but you get the point.

Amazon can keep attracting top talents like Villeneuve to these James Bond stories every eight to 10 years. By keeping them in their own separate worlds, they can avoid the extra time and energy that goes into coordinating it into a single world. The exclusivity options sweeten every deal, since Amazon can choose to put all of these things on their own platform for however long they wish before licensing to others.

For a long time, Bond has been chiefly a theatrical franchise with little in the way of mainstream popular extended world(s) in new books (as opposed to the original stories on which the films are often based or named) and TV and comics. Those things have existed in some mediums at some times, but never a larger overall popular cross-medium franchise like Harry Potter or comic book superheroes.

Fans of the franchise fear cheap spinoffs and merchandising to capitalize on Bond as just IP, not as a character with great stories to tell. The fear that the biggest online store in the world, owned by one of the wealthiest people on Earth, in an ever-expanding conglomerate exploitation of IP, might churn out low quality Bond movies made by committee and a host of low-rent spinoff TV shows is a valid concern.

But there’s no reason James Bond’s future has to turn out that way. Villeneuve’s hiring is a good first sign, to put it mildly. With an understanding of what audiences love about Bond and why they love it, Amazon can maintain the 007 franchise’s success and quality, while expanding it to other mediums, growing the audience, and keeping Bond relevant into the 21st Century.