Feb 22, 2025 10:47 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 23, 2025 01:51 AM by C C.)
To wit (BBC): What will Amazon do with James Bond?
Zero creative experience
https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/...ure-Amazon
EXCERPTS: For over 60 years, the British-American Broccoli family has maintained a non-compromising oversight over the much-cherished 007 movies, which they treated like a luxury brand. [...] The casting, script, director, and everything else for the reboot are now in the hands of Jeff Bezos’s mammoth company...
[...] As with George Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney, dedicated Bond fans are petrified that quality control of 007 will go out the window in favour of churning out lacklustre spin-offs... A source shared with Daily Express: “Since MGM was acquired by Amazon, the studio has steadily imported executives from their left-leaning West Coast offices in Seattle to head up their film and television projects. All of these suits have a corporate background and no Hollywood creative experience, which has caused a lot of growing pains within the studio.” (MORE - missing details)
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Amazon has taken control of Bond – and may have just killed him
https://www.aol.com/independent-spirit-a...11446.html
EXCERPTS: . . . what will likely kill off Bond is something all the more predictable in 2025: a slow, sad corporate takeover, men in suits trampling all over cinema’s most famous man in a suit.
In news that sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and 007 fandom on Thursday, long-time custodians of the franchise Eon announced they had ceded creative control of Bond to Amazon.
[...] What this will officially mean for the future of Bond is unclear, but there’s undeniably a sense of great loss to all of this: 007 has been in Broccoli hands since its cinematic conception, and for all the inconsistency of quality that has plagued the Bond films, they’ve rarely been total disasters. Smart casting and decent stunts have always managed to paper over the cracks and invisible cars along the way, and that comes from the top: producers who know these movies in their bones, where they’ve been and where they’re going.
One of Amazon’s biggest complaints about Eon, at least according to that Wall Street Journal report, was their aversion to risk, and how uncomfortable they were with the idea of mining the 007 property for all its worth (it was a “death knell”, the report claimed, when an Amazon executive referred to the franchise as “content” during a meeting with Barbara Broccoli).
But this has actually been a very good thing, Eon rarely sullying the Bond brand over the past 60 years. Flash-in-the-pan spin-off ideas have never historically got off the ground [...] the 007 video games and novels have been largely thoughtful and inventive, and Bond merchandising deals have always bent to the aspirational rather than the throwaway ... Before Amazon, the closest thing to a real Bond spin-off was a short-lived animated series about a young Bond at prep school, and that only lasted 65 episodes in 1991.
It’s meant that the James Bond franchise has retained an air of specialness – a new movie is an event, a once-every-few-years spectacle [...] There have been seven men who’ve played the character, all unique in their own way ... Now with the franchise under the cloak of Amazon, there is every chance this kind of conversation around 007 will cease entirely.
There will be a 007 in the new movies, likely a young 007, then different spin-off series each with an agent bearing the 007 codename. Plus the reality shows [...] Road to a Million game show in 2023. It’ll be death by a thousand Bonds, each to be scrolled through on your Prime Video landing page.
And care to imagine what this will mean for Ian Fleming’s most famous creation as a whole? Look no further than Star Wars, which has transformed from a relatively infrequent and distinct series of films into an exhausting and exhausted content mine in the space of less than 10 years. Dozens of spin-off movies have been mooted. TV series have come and gone.
Fans [of Star Wars] have largely revolted. Since the launch of the streaming platform Disney+ in November 2019, there have been seven live-action Star Wars TV shows, released with such (largely anonymous) consistency that you may not even have realised some of them exist. Did you know that there was a Star Wars series with Jude Law that ended its first season just last month?
This, depressingly, is set to be the future of Bond – a once great series of films diluted into a soup of algorithmic nothingness. Come 2026, we’ll be begging for the days when the biggest worry about 007 was whether he’ll still be allowed to flirt... (MORE - missing details)
Zero creative experience
https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/...ure-Amazon
EXCERPTS: For over 60 years, the British-American Broccoli family has maintained a non-compromising oversight over the much-cherished 007 movies, which they treated like a luxury brand. [...] The casting, script, director, and everything else for the reboot are now in the hands of Jeff Bezos’s mammoth company...
[...] As with George Lucas selling Star Wars to Disney, dedicated Bond fans are petrified that quality control of 007 will go out the window in favour of churning out lacklustre spin-offs... A source shared with Daily Express: “Since MGM was acquired by Amazon, the studio has steadily imported executives from their left-leaning West Coast offices in Seattle to head up their film and television projects. All of these suits have a corporate background and no Hollywood creative experience, which has caused a lot of growing pains within the studio.” (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Amazon has taken control of Bond – and may have just killed him
https://www.aol.com/independent-spirit-a...11446.html
EXCERPTS: . . . what will likely kill off Bond is something all the more predictable in 2025: a slow, sad corporate takeover, men in suits trampling all over cinema’s most famous man in a suit.
In news that sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and 007 fandom on Thursday, long-time custodians of the franchise Eon announced they had ceded creative control of Bond to Amazon.
[...] What this will officially mean for the future of Bond is unclear, but there’s undeniably a sense of great loss to all of this: 007 has been in Broccoli hands since its cinematic conception, and for all the inconsistency of quality that has plagued the Bond films, they’ve rarely been total disasters. Smart casting and decent stunts have always managed to paper over the cracks and invisible cars along the way, and that comes from the top: producers who know these movies in their bones, where they’ve been and where they’re going.
One of Amazon’s biggest complaints about Eon, at least according to that Wall Street Journal report, was their aversion to risk, and how uncomfortable they were with the idea of mining the 007 property for all its worth (it was a “death knell”, the report claimed, when an Amazon executive referred to the franchise as “content” during a meeting with Barbara Broccoli).
But this has actually been a very good thing, Eon rarely sullying the Bond brand over the past 60 years. Flash-in-the-pan spin-off ideas have never historically got off the ground [...] the 007 video games and novels have been largely thoughtful and inventive, and Bond merchandising deals have always bent to the aspirational rather than the throwaway ... Before Amazon, the closest thing to a real Bond spin-off was a short-lived animated series about a young Bond at prep school, and that only lasted 65 episodes in 1991.
It’s meant that the James Bond franchise has retained an air of specialness – a new movie is an event, a once-every-few-years spectacle [...] There have been seven men who’ve played the character, all unique in their own way ... Now with the franchise under the cloak of Amazon, there is every chance this kind of conversation around 007 will cease entirely.
There will be a 007 in the new movies, likely a young 007, then different spin-off series each with an agent bearing the 007 codename. Plus the reality shows [...] Road to a Million game show in 2023. It’ll be death by a thousand Bonds, each to be scrolled through on your Prime Video landing page.
And care to imagine what this will mean for Ian Fleming’s most famous creation as a whole? Look no further than Star Wars, which has transformed from a relatively infrequent and distinct series of films into an exhausting and exhausted content mine in the space of less than 10 years. Dozens of spin-off movies have been mooted. TV series have come and gone.
Fans [of Star Wars] have largely revolted. Since the launch of the streaming platform Disney+ in November 2019, there have been seven live-action Star Wars TV shows, released with such (largely anonymous) consistency that you may not even have realised some of them exist. Did you know that there was a Star Wars series with Jude Law that ended its first season just last month?
This, depressingly, is set to be the future of Bond – a once great series of films diluted into a soup of algorithmic nothingness. Come 2026, we’ll be begging for the days when the biggest worry about 007 was whether he’ll still be allowed to flirt... (MORE - missing details)