Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
It's a disaster Amazon is taking over. Broccoli and co really looked after the franchise, limiting the movies to one every few years without a wider universe and trying to keep the Bond tradition with premium brands and a British feel.
Amazon will be creating spin-off after spin-off, they are more likely to cast an American bond if they feel there is star power there and they will milk it for all it's worth.
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Actually I don’t think that’s at all likely based on what Amazon has commissioned and produced so far. Rings of Power is probably as good an example as any - whatever the purists have had to say about the characterisations, the series has been very faithful to the previous screen adaptation in look and feel. Way more than it needed to be, seeing as the Jackson movies were themselves an adaptation. But Amazon has understood it is producing the series for a screen audience and not bookish Tolkien purists, and has really delivered.
I also disagree that the Broccoli family has been that great at stewarding the franchise. By the late 1970s it was getting ridiculous, they were bringing films out every year, Moonraker is an absolute train wreck built on blind panic about Star Wars and they should have had Roger Moore out to pasture long before View to a Kill. And while I enjoyed the Craig series immensely, they maintained too little control over the artistic direction, especially given they were trying to do all his films as an arc, giving the overall body of work an inconsistent feel. And the negotiations over getting to use SPECTRE were allowed to drag on way too long, meaning the unfolding villainy across the series doesn’t entirely make narrative sense. And they can hardly have been unaware of how difficult some purchasers of parts of the Fleming estate can be to deal with.
The films are going to be made by MGM, which Amazon owns, and which has been the distributor for Eon productions Bond films. MGM knows what a good Bond film is meant to be like. What I hope we see is a faithful exploration of the character in an entirely new and original set of adventures, without any sense of obligation to weave in a bit of one short story here and a bit of another novel there, which is what often seemed to be the case previously.