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Yes, Mr Bond, I expect you to die
Stephen Armstrong on 007’s precarious future
The trailer for the new James Bond film is a suitably action-packed and glamorous montage of high-speed car chases, high-end tailoring and high-velocity
weapons. It kicks off with Daniel Craig hurling himself off the ancient Roman bridge in Gravina di Puglia and ends with him machine-gunning a crashing car in a misty forest. About halfway through, Ralph
Fiennes as M stares at a screen and mutters, ‘Come on, Bond… where the hell are you?’
007’s fans have been feeling the same way. To say that No Time to Die has been a
long time coming is like saying Godot is running a little late. The film was originally intended to hit screens in 2019, four years after Bond’s last outing, Spectre. Indeed, as is always the case, Spectre’s final credits promised ‘James Bond will return’, although, crucially, no date was given. And while we’ve been waiting, an almighty battle has broken out over Bond’s billions that could not only influence the casting of Daniel Craig’s replacement and determine where the franchise goes next, but also help define the future direction of the entire entertainment industry, from streaming services to cinema itself. On screen and off, it seems, Bond is in the midst of a global and personal crisis – and the stakes have never been higher.
First, the delays: original director Danny Boyle left the No Time to Die project over ‘creative differences’ with producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the gatekeepers of the Bond franchise. Broccoli is the daughter of original Bond producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and leads on creative decisions while Wilson, her half-brother, is an ex-lawyer working in the background.
After Boyle, they hired Cary Joji Fukunaga to direct and asked Phoebe Waller-bridge to rework the script and haul Bond into the post-metoo era. October 2019’s release date became April 2020. Then the pandemic hit and a series of rolling postponements pushed the film to November 2020, April 2021 and finally the end of this month.
Ultimately, Bond has been deliberately delayed in order to maximise box-office receipts when it is finally released, but moving the film around has had an enormous impact on cash-strapped cinema chains coping with empty auditoria. When news broke of the Bond pushback, Hollywood’s trade paper Variety’s headline read ‘No Time to Die delay spells disaster for struggling movie theaters’, warning that ‘the move could set off a wave of closures’. No other single movie has the power to rescue or kill an industry. As Daniel Craig says towards the end of the new film’s trailer, ‘If we don’t do this, there will be nothing left to save.’
However, the world into which Bond is re-emerging looks markedly different from 2015, and not just because of the pandemic. For one thing, he has a new boss. In May, Amazon paid $8.45 billion to acquire the MGM studio, co-owners of the Bond franchise. For another, the cultural landscape has changed enormously, and the values James Bond represents feel more out of step than ever. The assumption that audiences will always love Bond no longer holds true. With Daniel Craig preparing to hang up his tuxedo, the search for a new leading man who is deemed appropriate is arguably the biggest casting conundrum in movie history.
The media landscape has been transformed in the past six years, too. Since 2015, movie studios like Disney and Warner Bros have launched streaming services to rival Netflix, with blockbusters premiering online either at the same time as, or instead of, a cinema release. What’s more, thanks to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige’s 2007 moment of inspiration, most successful franchises are now expected to have their own ‘universe’. Marvel’s sprawling set of interconnected superhero films (a resolutely diverse array, from Black Panther to Shang-chi) and TV shows currently stands at 25 movies and 12 series.
Since the last Bond film appeared, television has stopped being cinema’s poor relation or rival – the two now work in tandem. Disney’s hugely successful streaming service Disney+ is now fuelled by Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars films and spinoff shows. James Bond in 2021 is in danger of looking like he didn’t get the memo – or, like Bond spoof Austin Powers, a man out of time.
So why did Amazon buy MGM? According to an anonymous Hollywood strategist who blogs under the name The Entertainment Strategy Guy (Entstratguy), the studio’s value comes down to one man: James Bond. ‘To work out the value of a studio’s library, look at its 100th biggest movie,’ he explains. ‘Disney’s is Lincoln, with a US box office of $182 million. MGM’S is Blown Away, with a US box office of $30 million. After Bond, the value of MGM’S IP (intellectual property) drops off a cliff.’
Amazon thinks they’ve got themselves a good deal. With total earnings to date of $6.89 billion, the Bond franchise is the fourth biggest in cinema history – still some way behind the $9.18 billion Harry Potter/fantastic Beasts collection, the $10.2 billion Star Wars saga and the ever-expanding $22.59 billion Marvel Cinematic Universe. But given that there hasn’t been a Bond movie since 2015, fourth place seems a very healthy position for a British spy with a rich backstory that’s brimming with spin-off potential. Analysts assume that, since streaming services like Amazon need high-value IP to keep pace with Holly
wood studios, Bond is ripe for exploitation.
And yet, zooming in a little closer, there’s a lethal timer ticking down for Bond, presumably in red LED numbers. In this case, it’s a demographic time bomb that 007 will find difficult to defuse. While Marvel’s audience is young, diverse and expanding, Bond’s is old, male, white and shrinking. Since Daniel Craig picked up Her Majesty’s licence to kill in 2006, the total box office of all his Bond films combined is $3.1 billion, a tidy piece of change until it’s compared with Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, which took $2.7 billion alone. Only 2012’s Skyfall has taken over $1 billion, placing it at 28 in the all-time global box office charts. 2015’s Spectre showed signs of fatigue, taking $880 million. Are film fans falling out of love with Bond?
According to data from the BFI for 2015, Spectre’s biggest demographic was male and aged over 45. According to social media analysts Linkfluence, the core of Bond’s audience is older still – online chat about the franchise is largely among men aged 55-64. Bond needs to be a money-making machine with mass appeal in order to survive, but that is tricky when he is ‘a white man in white world – with token people of colour’, according to Stacy Jones, CEO of Hollywood Branded, a Los Angeles product-placement company. ‘Studios – and streamers even more so – want to create content that is inclusionary. Streamers take more risks and tend to be more liberal. Bond has always been risk-averse. The traditional future Bond audience, younger males, are more likely to be playing video games these days, so Bond will also have to reach women. [His producers] have to consider not casting a white guy and they have to give women
stronger roles than just getting shot after having sex with Bond.’
Bond’s hardcore audience are not ready for this. When Bond returns to active service in No Time to Die, his licence to kill and his 00 status has been inherited by an agent called Nomi, played by Captain Marvel star Lashana Lynch. When the news broke that 007 was now a black woman, Lynch received so much online abuse that she deleted her social media accounts.
Appealing to a younger crowd may prove tricky. In 2018, when online men’s magazine Ladbible showed Bond films to millennials and Generation Z viewers who weren’t familiar with the franchise, they were appalled by Bond passim, describing him as ‘a rapist who occasionally murders a Russian’, ‘extremely racist’ and taking particular offence at Skyfall’s Severine subplot, where Bond chats up a former sex slave, sneaks naked into her shower to seduce her, then abandons her to die. So who do the makers of Bond target, going forward, and where is the money? The old guys or the millennials?
‘You can’t resolve this just by casting a black Bond,’ argues Stephen Follows, a leading UK film analyst. ‘It’s not that there’s an audience desperate for Bond who are put off by how white he is and would flock to the films if they just hired a black lead. Bond is a man with a gun who can solve a problem. In the Cold War, that worked. You could smuggle out the microfilm and you’re the hero. There’s no feasible way Bond could solve the airlift out of Kabul. This is why, since Pierce Brosnan, the theme of the films has been a Cold War spy slightly out of his element, but you can’t play that out for ever. Le Carré’s stories were so compelling because they reflect the complexity of our world. Bond would need a complete reboot.’ In other words, Bond’s problem is more than just a tricky piece of movie marketing. It’s a cultural identity crisis.
Choosing the next actor to play 007, one which needs to satisfy both the incensed fanbase who initially rejected Daniel Craig because ‘Bond can’t be blond’ and the
youngsters who find the character more than a little rapey, is not going to be easy. Right now, the bookies’ longlist includes Bridgerton’s Regé-jean Page, former Spiderman Tom Holland, ice-cold Cillian Murphy, the alarming Tom Hardy, dishevelled Robert Pattinson, James Norton, skilled kiltwearer Sam Heughan, loveable Riz Ahmed, action expert Daniel Kaluuya, John Boyega, Aidan Turner’s abs and the previously rejected as not lean enough Henry Cavill, alongside the frankly-too-old Idris Elba. And while that decision will be more a commercial than creative one, it rests largely in the hands of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson. Which highlights what might be the biggest problem when it comes to planning Bond’s future. ‘Broccoli has the final veto over everything,’ explains Entstratguy. ‘Amazon has spent all this money to win the right to negotiate with her.’
TThe opening car chase, filmed in Matera, Italy, could boost the local economy by €12 million
Gen Z think of Bond as ‘a rapist who occasionally murders a Russian’
he way the Bond business is run is an historical anomaly, which is why – unlike most of big franchises – 007 films are released rarely, have no spin-offs and sell no associated merchandise. From a corporate viewpoint, Bond is still living in the 1960s. EON, the company that produces the films, was founded in 1962 by Harry Saltzman – a Canadian circus performer who moved to the UK to produce movies in the 1950s and bought the film rights to Goldfinger after reading the book – and Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, Queens-born cousin of mobster Pat Dicicco who worked his way up from the mailroom at 20th Century Fox. The two negotiated a canny deal – still in place – that guarantees the estate of Bond creator Ian Fleming 10 per cent of the profits in return for relinquishing all creative control. They promptly launched EON alongside a Geneva based company, Danjaq – a contraction of their wives Dana and Jacqueline’s names. Ever since then, EON has produced the films and sold them at cost to Danjaq.
From the 1960s to 1980s, Danjaq’s entire staff was a lawyer called Mr Schlaepp who, in court papers, revealed he knows nothing about movies. Eventually, in the 1990s, the
Broccolis moved Danjaq to Delaware – a domestic tax haven in the US – but still sells the Bond film to the company ‘for a price equal to the total cost of production less the amount received in UK Film Tax Credits’.
And things only get more complicated from there. The rights to all but one of the earlier films are co-owned by MGM and Danjaq. The rights to the Daniel Craig films, however, are co-owned by MGM, Danjaq and Sony subsidiary Columbia pictures, while No Time to Die is jointly owned by MGM, Danjaq, Annapurna Pictures and Universal. Whoever stumps up the cash, however, EON in effect has the creative control.
In any case, says Charles Gant, awards and box office editor at trade bible Screen International, ‘Broccoli and Wilson have probably already chosen [the new lead actor], and they’ll want to announce as soon as possible to get started on the next film now they’ve missed the chance to have a 60th anniversary movie.’ Amazon, in other words, has arrived too late to influence this crucial casting decision, although they may struggle to exert any kind of creative influence over EON anyway. During the making of Spectre, MGM president Jonathan Glickman desperately tried to cut back on the soaring budget overspend, saying shooting in a villa in Rome was too expensive, the train fight needed fewer carriages and the finale shouldn’t take place in the rain. Barbara Broccoli refused every request.
Persuading Broccoli to exploit the wider Bond IP seems to be Amazon’s best bet. ‘You could see James Bond TV on Amazon,’ says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. ‘You could have the exact same people from the movie in a 10-hour series, maybe following the adventures of Moneypenny. That would get greenlit and funded and help bring in a different audience, while keeping the main brand intact.’
‘The one thing Barbara can’t risk is for the Bond brand to go downmarket, as they rely
so much on expensive brand partnerships to fund the films,’ explains Stacy Jones. ‘Bond is sophisticated, luxury, high-end and cutting edge. It has the advantage over Marvel and Star Wars that big brands can appear in the films and that makes sense. You wouldn’t see a Sony phone on Tatooine but you could in Bond’s hands.’
Daniel Craig takes the view that product placement in films like Skyfall is a ‘fact of life’. He told Vanity Fair, ‘A Bond movie like this costs over $100 million to make – it’s the nature of it, the size of the movie. And it costs another $200 million to sell it. So the $200 million has to come from somewhere. We couldn’t afford to make those movies if we didn’t have those sponsors. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’
Product placement has been part of Bond since he sipped a Red Stripe in Dr No. While in the books his favourite tipple is a scotch and soda, Smirnoff ’s cash means the vodka martini – shaken not stirred – has become 007’s marketing slogan. The early films featured tie-ins with the airline Pan Am and Smith & Wesson firearms, Aston Martin came onboard for 1964’s Goldfinger, Bollinger for 1973’s Live and Let Die and there’s been cash for screen time from Camel,
Playboy, 7 Up, Toblerone and even KFC.
Meanwhile, countries have long competed to be among Bond’s exotic destinations. Mexico offered $20 mil‘bond lion in tax breaks to feature in
Spectre, whilst Norway offered a $5.5 million grant for a starring role in No Time to Die. The reasons are obvious. The mayor of Matera, the town in Basilicata, Italy, that provides the backdrop for the opening car chase, predicts No Time to Die will provide a €12 million boost to the local economy.
One reason why Bond films continue to be made is that brands and tourist boards keep throwing money at him, but with an ageing audience those contributions can’t be taken for granted. Smirnoff pulled out of Bond ahead of 2002’s Die Another Day saying, ‘We are really looking to attract consumers that are more in the 21 to 29 age group,’ although the vodka has since returned. The advertising industry, as Harrington points out, ‘doesn’t want anything to do with older people, [even though] that’s where all the money is. In this case, Amazon will be good for Bond. It’s a shop. It wants people who buy stuff – and people who buy stuff are older.’
Amazon clearly believes its $8 billion gamble is worth the risk. Yet even if they lose money, there could be hope for 007. As Stephen Follows argues, it is a false assumption that Hollywood makes films for financial reasons. Despite appearances to the contrary, the industry ‘isn’t really incentivised by money. It’s incentivised by stories.’ Why do film studios release their box office numbers when they are not compelled to do so? To create the impression that the movie industry is sloshing with cash. ‘Crisps makers don’t say how many crisps they sold. It’s because [for film studios] the numbers aren’t the business, they’re the story. Bond is the biggest example of that – the stories are all it is. can’t compete with Marvel,’ he adds, ‘it needs to be owned by someone who just wants it on the mantelpiece. Amazon didn’t buy Bond for money – Amazon has money. It makes space rockets for fun. Amazon wants Bond for the same reason they want to go to the moon. Which makes them probably the only people who can say, with absolute certainty, that “James Bond will return”.’