It’s hard not to get swept up in the James Bond speculation. Has Callum Turner landed the role, as reports suggest? Does Jack Lowden still have a shot?
Or will they just give up, feed a JPEG of Sean Connery into ChatGPT, and see what it pumps out? It’s all a fun guessing game, really. But one factor is arguably more important than the man playing 007: the new media machine behind it all.
Daniel Craig's fifteen-year tenure churned through four directors—Martin Campbell, Marc Forster, Sam Mendes, and Cary Joji Fukunaga—who all operated under the watchful eye of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Their family had held creative control since the film franchise's inception. That was, until the pair sold their share to Amazon last year.
Bezos and co.'s first order of business was to hire Dune director Denis Villeneuve, arguably the franchise's first-ever auteur, alongside Peaky Blinders scribe Steven Knight—and it's their collective vision that will really define this new era. Villeneuve is, in my mind, the philosopher king of modern blockbuster cinema. On top of the scale, flair and the star-studded casts that he brings to his grandest films, including the Dune trilogy, he can be trusted to pose challenging ethical and political questions.
He'll no doubt bring that same lens to a franchise that has tried, with varying degrees of success, to address hot-button issues. Ian Fleming's original novels, and the early films to an extent, position Bond as a near-unstoppable, ass-kicking international superspy serving "Queen and country" with little complaint; a wish-fulfilling antidote to the slow but terminal decline of the British Empire. On-screen, that approach started to shift in the 1990s.
Pierce Brosnan's smirking spy is mocked as a relic of the Cold War. Daniel Craig's grittier films took that further, reckoning with the character's increasingly outmoded presence in a culture that had moved beyond sexist wisecracks and silly gadgets. There was plenty of flag-waving along the way, but Broccoli's films nonetheless asked questions about Britain's standing on the world stage.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
