The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family\u2019s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert \u201cCubby\u201d Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.)<\/p>\n
Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise. According to an unnamed \u201csource close to the production\u201d who spoke to RadarOnline, \u201cWriters are tearing their hair out.\u201d At the end of No Time to Die, \u201cBond didn\u2019t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death \u2013 he was blown to pieces on screen. Everyone agrees it was a massive mistake because Bond is supposed to be eternal. They are now stuck trying to find a believable way to resurrect him, and it is proving almost impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a conundrum for sure. Let me modestly suggest an obvious solution: Bond, having died, can stay dead. There should never be another Bond movie. He has lived his life and fulfilled his purpose.<\/p>\n
No Time to Die ended the internally coherent, five-film Daniel Craig saga neatly. Having long since run out of Ian Fleming novels to base movies on, the producers had taken to plumbing the lore of the franchise itself, inventing more backstory for a character so iconic that merely saving the world was not enough. For Craig\u2019s Bond, that meant wrestling with an inability to form trusting, lasting relationships with women \u2013 given how many of his femmes turn out to be fatale \u2013 and adding baddies that turn out to have a connection to his childhood past, such as the reveal in Spectre (2015) that longtime series big bad Ernst Stavro Blofeld is Bond\u2019s adoptive brother.<\/p>\n
No Time to Die, despite some criticism that it had made Bond \u201cwoke\u201d by turning Q gay and having the 007 moniker taken up by a black woman, thus found the logical and indeed only way to level up the stakes for a hero who had already bedded 60 years\u2019 worth of Earth\u2019s most gorgeous women, driven the coolest cars, defused nukes, been to space, and helped defeat the Soviet empire: It made him a father. Its climactic scene sees 007 sacrificing himself for his little girl as he tells her mother over the radio, \u201cMadeline, you have made the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Perfect, because she came from you.\u201d L\u00e9a Seydoux\u2019s Madeline assures him, in a stoic attempt to hide her heartbreak with flirtation, that \u201cshe does have your eyes.\u201d Bond\u2019s last words are \u201cI know, I know.\u201d Perhaps parents never really die.<\/p>\n
The genius of the James Bond character, and the reason it became the most iconic film franchise of all time, is that it fulfills two fantasies at once. The first is of a Britain that did not come undone after winning World War Two. The post-war Britain<\/a> in which the novels appeared was still in an era of rationing, and it salved a great society\u2019s wounded ego to imagine that her majesty\u2019s agents were not only saving the world, but doing so while sipping Bollinger. The second is male wish-fulfillment. Put a suave man in a situation where competently applied violence is the answer, and he\u2019ll have found his purpose \u2013 or so he imagines. Shake (not stir) these two fantasies together, and that\u2019s why people love 007.<\/p>\n No Time to Die had to deal with the baggage of 60 years of film audiences who had already seen Bond fulfill all those wishes, though. So it drew on the unfairly hated source text of On Her Majesty\u2019s Secret Service, the sixth film, starring one-timer George Lazenby. In both No Time to Die and OHMSS, we see Bond undo a sinister biological-weapons plot and drive the same Aston Martin DBS to the same baleful Louis Armstrong song. We also see him break the canonical formula of self-contained stories to do some family formation, in this case getting married to Tracy Bond, who is then tragically gunned down in his arms.<\/p>\n