Yesterday, Hollywood was struck with the bombshell news that EON Productions made a new deal where their creative control of the James Bond film franchise now goes to Amazon MGM Studios.
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.
Following rumours of internal clashes over the future of the next Bond, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson are getting out. However, they will still receive credit and a cut of 007 going forward.
The casting, script, director, and everything else for the reboot are now in the hands of Jeff Bezos’s mammoth company, which purchased MGM Studios for $8.5 billion a couple of years ago.
Daniel Craig exploded out of the franchise in 2021’s No Time To Die, and with Amazon referring to the British institution as ‘content’ behind the scenes, many fear that Ian Fleming’s spy is well and truly dead.
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. Bezos’ recent social media polling of fans on who should replace Craig is enough to make any Brit cringe. And given the backlash to what many perceived as woke narrative elements in recent Star Wars series The Acolyte (which was cancelled) and Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV show, are we about to witness the same happen to Bond? According to a Hollywood insider, it’s certainly looking that way.
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.”
The insider clarified that these executives will work across MGM Studios, so it’s not certain if they’ll have a hand on Bond in the end, but it’s certainly possible considering Amazon’s internal corporate politics. Given Bezos’s appearance at Trump’s inauguration, perhaps things will change, but the idea of American executives taking our beloved British spy in all his politically incorrect glory and turning him into a naff sludge of algorithmic-driven “content” fills us with dread.