It has been 10 years since Daniel Craig said he was done with 007 - and three since he died on screen. Jonathan Dean investigates how Bond HQ lost the plot.
There was a stunned hush at the Royal Albert Hall on September 28, 2021, as the closing credits rolled on the world premiere of No Time to Die. Fans and royal guests, including Prince Charles, took stock: their hero had just been blown to smithereens. He was dead. Was that it? No more martinis for Mr Bond?
The panic, though, was short-lived, as the final words on screen announced: “James Bond will return.” But the questions soon started buzzing. When and how would 007 rise again, and who would it be? James Bond is dead! Long live James Bond?
No Time to Die hit cinemas almost three and a half years ago. There have been three prime ministers since then, and that prince is now King Charles. But there is still no new 007 - only a simmering national debate as we await the seventh Bond, seemingly no closer to finding the right man to replace Daniel Craig.
In truth, the quest for a new Bond has been running for a decade, ever since Craig said - on promo duties for Spectre in 2015 - that he would rather “slash my wrists” than play the spy again. He returned for No Time to Die but walked off set for the last time in 2019. Like Blofeld’s bomb, time is now ticking on Britain’s biggest movie export, as once-mooted replacements such as Idris Elba grow too old and industry sages begin to wonder if our restless pop culture has simply moved on.
Bond has never been in such a fine mess - much of it because of a seismic business deal that set the franchise’s wizened guardians up against the latest brash kid on the block. In 2021 Amazon bought MGM for US$8.45 billion ($14.9b), acquiring MGM’s financial stake in the James Bond franchise through its partnership with Eon Productions.
Amazon’s executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, the man with the golden everything, is not the brains most people wanted in charge - “We can develop that IP for the 21st century,” he declared of 007 - but there was one detail about the deal that Bond fans clung to. Despite Amazon’s purchase, the contract stated that the Eon supremos Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson would retain creative control. Theirs was a historic company deeply invested in the big screen - except now they were working with the same streamer you bought your lawnmower off. What could possibly go wrong?
I have met Broccoli on numerous occasions and she was always friendly, if steely and not afraid to be blunt. So when, at the end of 2021, I asked what the Amazon deal meant for Bond, she was not exactly effusive. “The truth is we don’t know,” she said. “We are not really any more enlightened about how we fit in.”
And how is that relationship going now? “These people are f***ing idiots,” an exasperated Broccoli told friends last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Or, as her father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, once said: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”
Barbara Broccoli, 64, bleeds Bond. Her father passed her the reins when he died in 1996, but she had been working in some capacity on the franchise since The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977.
“Barbara is the perfect captain,” says Mark O’Connell, a Bond scholar and the author of Catching Bullets: Memoirs of a Bond Fan. “A lot of fans say her father would be rolling in his grave over what they did to Bond, but no - he’d actually be dancing a jig.” The most successful Bond films of all time at the box office, clocking up 10 Oscar nominations, have starred Craig. “But the flip side is, where do they go now?”
The spy series has been here before. A combination of financial pressures, a change of lead and questions about Bond’s place in a post-Soviet world meant there were six years, four months and 10 days between 1989’s Licence to Kill (Timothy Dalton’s curtain call) and 1995’s GoldenEye (the first to feature Pierce Brosnan). That is, as yet, the longest gap between Bond films.
The next Bond will have to be released by February 2028 to avoid taking that unwanted record. Yet such a time frame seems optimistic. The industry consensus is that we will be waiting another three years at least. Of course, the producers need a script, a director and an actor. But according to Ajay Chowdhury, a film industry lawyer and a co-author of Spy Octane: The Vehicles of James Bond, the immediate and most difficult task is the labyrinth of existing deals, involving MGM, Amazon, Universal and United Artists, that must be negotiated before anyone can slip on 007’s dinner jacket.
“The Bond franchise is like a plot of land and Amazon is still building the foundations,” Chowdhury says. “Casting a star is as far off as choosing curtains.” Since the last Bond, he explains, the business of cinema has changed. “Covid means movies make less money at cinemas now, so any Bond film needs to be budgeted accordingly. It’s unsexy, but right now they’re working out the back-end deal.”
That recalibration may even mean a shift away from Pinewood to filming abroad - anything to reduce the cost of building expensive semi-permanent sets.
Adding to the delay is the struggling blockbuster business. Seemingly sure-fire hits such as the Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones sequels have all floundered at the box office. The last lost an estimated US$143 million ($253m). “There is a real pause in confidence on big films,” O’Connell says. “And that filters down to Bond.”
The average blockbuster costs at least US$250m ($442m) to make - US$25m ($44m) of which, for No Time to Die, was spent on Craig. That film made US$774m ($1.4b) worldwide - a decent sum during Covid, but the dominance of streaming has only increased since.
Chowdhury believes the recent Wall Street Journal article exposing division within the Bond ranks might have been briefed by Eon insiders - an attempt to reassure “the most important audience, the Amazon stockholders”, that despite tensions the two companies were at least working together. Late last year it was announced that Eon was remaking another of its titles, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with Amazon.
And now for the fun part: who that elusive actor might be. Here’s what we know so far. First, everybody I talk to - agents, actors, analysts - believes we are due a return to a Bond of quips and camp, a shift away from the Shakespearean heft of Craig. More traditional yet easier to sell via memes to Amazon’s younger demographic.
Broccoli has long kiboshed the idea of Bond being a woman. “He can be any colour, but he is male,” she said in 2020. The people I speak to coalesce around the following likely attributes: the next Bond will be white, good-looking, in their early to mid-thirties (about the age of Ian Fleming’s character) and will need someone able to devote a decade of their career to the role. They need a Goldilocks amount of fame - not too much, not too little - just as Craig had when he was cast.
“But Bond won’t be broken,” Chowdhury says of the next film, “because it’s ultimately a hugely successful brand and you don’t mess with that. You don’t turn a Coke can blue.”
Tom Hardy, 47, and Tom Hiddleston, 43, are now out of the picture as contenders, as are the long-rumoured James Norton, 39, and Aidan Turner, 41. “They were Sunday-night TV totty rumours,” O’Connell says. You can also probably discount Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan, who, if the rumours that they have signed up for Sam Mendes’s Beatles biopics are true, won’t have the time.
The job of the next Bond is now light years away from what Craig had to do. Whoever gets cast will have a very different contract to previous 007s. It used to be so simple: sign on for three films and an optional fourth. Now agents expect something clause-heavy, covering expected spin-offs into TV series and video games.
Eon has never been as shy of this as purists claim. There was the James Bond Jr TV series in the early 1990s, while 1997’s GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 is one of the greatest video games of all time. Amazon launched the reality show 007: Road to a Million, hosted by the actor Brian Cox, in 2023. But according to Chowdhury, Bond is still seen as “undercapitalised” compared with, say, Star Wars, with its 24 TV series. “They’re not wringing every last cent from it,” he says.
Already there are rumours of how Bond might be grown — whether via a rumoured Miss Moneypenny spin-off, another go at young Bond, or a period TV show based on Fleming’s novels. It means that agents will have to sign clients bold enough to step into Craig’s shoes for a run of films, as well as vocal and image work for video games, guest appearances in any subsidiary TV shows, and maybe adverts. “I don’t think Broccoli is against this,” Chowdhury says. “Eon just want to get the film done first.”
The Bond brand is as tangled as its villainous antagonist, Spectre. When the former Fast Show writer Charlie Higson launched his set of Young Bond books with SilverFin in 2005, his excited publisher wanted to piggyback on the imminent film Casino Royale by using the Bond logo on the dust jacket. The issue? The novels are published by Ian Fleming Publications but the logo rights are owned by Eon. So no logo.
Even so, Higson - who went on to write four more Young Bond novels, as well as a special adult Bond novella for King Charles’s coronation - suggests that these books offer a path that the Bond overlords could follow.
“A lot of literary estates are very precious,” Higson says. “But the Fleming board want new ideas. The literary side is useful in keeping Bond alive for fans when there isn’t a film, and obviously we are in a big hiatus. There is a new Qseries of books next year [The Q Mysteries by Vaseem Khan] and Kim Sherwood’s books about the other 007s.”
The latter series launched in 2022 with a story about Bond going missing and his fellow MI6 spies 003, 004 and 009 taking his place. As Higson says, it shows Eon and Amazon what can be done - although the villain in Sherwood’s novel is a tech billionaire, which might not appeal to Bezos.
Still, something surely has to be done, and soon. Bond mimics, from Eddie Redmayne’s The Day of the Jackal to Keira Knightley’s Black Doves, crop up almost monthly. Is there a danger that Eon and Amazon might leave things too long?
“It’s nonsense to say that suddenly people don’t want those types of hero characters,” Higson says. “In such murky times the idea of the fantasy villain that Bond can deal with appeals hugely. He cuts through the bullshit, sorts things out with a car, gun, drink, witty quip.” Or as Chowdhury surmises, people care: “No one asks, ‘Is this the end of Jason Bourne?’”
And he’s right. Along with the Beatles, Bond represents one of the pillars of British cultural soft power, and the appetite for a new film is arguably stronger than ever. Maybe Eon was sending us a message with the song that played over the end credits for No Time to Die: Louis Armstrong’s We Have All the Time in the World. But do they?
Young guns: which actor will be the next Bond?
Jack Lowden, 34
Lowden doesn’t need to audition - he’s the obvious choice: witness the Scotsman’s natural wit in Slow Horses.
Leo Woodall, 28
The man of the hour has shown he can do a Bond-friendly cheeky narcissist (One Day, The White Lotus). His next turn, as Bridget Jones’s love interest, will consolidate or worsen his chances.
Josh O’Connor, 34
Fresh from La chimera and Challengers, O’Connor has the depth required for a different kind of 007 - modern, vulnerable and slightly freaky.
Micheal Ward, 27
The Bafta-winning Top Boy star’s range could mean he’s next to drive the Aston Martin. Fleming wrote the novels in Jamaica: could the next Bond hail from the island?
Joe Alwyn, 33
In The Favourite and Conversations with Friends, Alwyn has proved he can do understated intensity. But will Taylor Swift’s ex be up for the limelight again?
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London