[COLUMN] Why Amazon's Purchase of James Bond is Bad News | by Darren Mooney

No, Mister Bezos, I expect you to buy. News came through earlier in the week that Amazon had bought the rights to the James Bond film franchise, effectively ending the control that the Broccoli family held over the icon for decades.

There is, perhaps, a small irony in the idea of the James Bond franchise being purchased by a bald man with a vaguely supervillainous vibe who also has ambitions of surpassing nation states in the space race. Given Amazon’s tendency to produce shows like The Boys and Invincible, which can feel like fan fiction written by Superman’s bald billionaire arch-enemy, one looks forward to a sympathetic eight-episode streaming retelling of the origin of the James Bond franchise’s bald weirdo supervillain, Blofeld, recasting Bond as an evil union organizer.

Joking aside, in some senses, this purchase was not a surprise. Amazon had recently purchased MGM, a studio known in part for its long association with the James Bond franchise. Many of the reports of that acquisition noted the tension in that purchase, with Amazon controlling the studio that released James Bond movies but not James Bond itself. Amazon had clearly been trying to cash in on the franchise, indirectly with the spy show Citadel and directly through licensed reality television game shows.

However, it still feels strange. Over the past few decades, studios have been eagerly snatching up brands and intellectual properties. Disney purchased Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm and Pixar to bolster its own brand. Netflix has tried to build out its own shared universes with projects like The Grey Man and to develop in-house takes on known quantities like the Narnia books. Warner Bros. have bet big, and continue to bet big, on their DC superheroes.

These intellectual property plays tend to follow the same pattern. Initially, fans are delighted to get more “content”, to have an artifact of their childhood return in a way that plays to their nostalgia. However, as the studio cranks the faucet, fans quickly find themselves drowning in “content soup.” What was once special and unique becomes common and generic. It’s a process of “cultural fracking”, an effort to extract maximum shareholder value as ruthlessly and quickly as possible.

Amazon has experience with this particular pipeline. The studio famously spent a billion dollars on The Rings of Power, a television spin-off from The Lord of the Rings, producing the most expensive television show in the history of the medium. However, the show could not maintain audience interest. Leaked internal documents suggest that only 37% of American viewers made it to the end of the first season. Its audience collapsed by 60% between the first and second season.

The James Bond franchise was one of the rare modern franchises to avoid that fate. As Star Wars, Star Trek, the Marvel Cinematic Universes and other brands found themselves consigned to the cultural purgatory of “always on” streaming shows, the James Bond franchise retained a touch of class and credibility. It was the Aston Martin of mainstream film franchises. A lot of that came from the fact that it was not owned by an international conglomerate, but by an individual family.

None of this is to suggest that the James Bond franchise was always good. In fact, much of it is quite bad. Nor is it to imply that the series was ever above chasing larger cultural trends, whether the Star Wars aesthetic of Moonraker and the blaxploitation vibes of Live and Let Die or the modern grounded reboot aesthetic and lore-driven focus of the recent Daniel Craig movies. It’s also impossible to argue that films with this much product placement were truly artisanal.

Indeed, it is notable that the franchise used to be much closer to modern multimedia franchises. Decades ago, the production team would crank out sequels on a tightly regimented schedule. Those films would typically be directed by a small pool of in-house talents like Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert and John Glen. There was Never Say Never, a stillborn spin-off franchise stemming from a rights dispute. There was even an animated spin-off, James Bond Jr.

However, as the franchise entered the modern age, it became a bit more refined. While other theatrical franchises turned to work-for-hire television directors and accelerated production cycles, the James Bond franchise slowed down. Instead of hiring anonymous journeyman filmmakers, the James Bond franchise embraced auteur filmmakers like Sam Mendes and Cary Joji Fukunaga. It slowed the pace of release, adopting an “it’s done when it’s done” approach to scheduling.

This approach undoubtedly frustrated certain conservative elements of fandom, who bristled at the long waits between the individual releases, who whined about delays in casting announcements and who complained that these films dared to make actual narrative decisions rather than simply algorithmically retreading old ground. However, at a point in time where almost every major franchise was diluting the value of its brand, the James Bond films still felt like events.

It's worth acknowledging that this approach worked. Of the past five films in the franchise, two rank among the five best-reviewed in the series’ long history and three make the top ten. Skyfall was the second-highest grossing movie of 2012, sitting squarely between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. No Time To Die was the fourth-highest grossing movie of 2021, the second-highest grossing English-language release of the year.

Despite his public ambivalence about the role, this approach also left enough room for Daniel Craig to become something approximating a movie star in the space between films. While Craig may not necessarily be a household name, he was able to alternate starring as James Bond with working with auteurs like Steven Soderbergh on movies like Logan Lucky and launching a second auteur-driven franchise with Knives Out. This is more than any of the big Marvel Studios stars have managed to do.

All things considered, this was a relatively healthy way to run a major franchise. It was financially lucrative, reasonably critically successful and it had the benefit of producing perhaps the franchise’s first breakout lead since Sean Connery, and Connery famously had to quit the role to capitalize on his fame. There was a sense that the decisions driving the series were being made by human beings, rather than by test audiences, focus groups and computer simulations.

While earlier James Bond movies could be bad – very bad, in fact – there was something to be said for the unique ways in which those movies were bad. Misfires like The Man With the Golden Gun or Die Another Day were awful, but they were awful in very peculiar and very specific ways. They are bad in a different way than something like, say, Captain America: Brave New World, a film that is trying so hard not to be actively awful that it can’t be bothered to do anything else.

The modern studio system pushes these properties towards familiarity and repetition. There were already shades of this in the Daniel Craig era, with the reintroduction of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) in Spectre with a new backstory that ties him more closely with Bond. However, that sort of nonsense seems relatively quaint in a world where studios feel the need to explain the surname “Solo” or spend an entire season explaining why Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) must end up in a wheelchair.

Indeed, in a franchise landscape dominated by properties that are stuck in cycles of perpetual nostalgia, there is something to be said for the decision to give Daniel Craig’s James Bond a very clear and structured arc across his five films, from a very firm start in Casino Royale to a very definitive ending in No Time to Die. At a point when it seems like digital technology will allow actors to play their iconic roles forever, No Time to Die dared to draw a line under Craig’s tenure.

There was also something to be celebrated in the cultural specificity of the James Bond franchise. The series was a uniquely British institution. It had a distinctly British character. It is slightly frustrating to see that British identity brushed away so that the character can be used to market a gigantic American conglomerate. Nearly three decades after GoldenEye, it seems like the character has truly entered a post-nation-state era.

Then again, this is the reality of the modern entertainment landscape, where the realities of the business seem to make it impossible for these highly successful properties to exist without investment from some large foreign entity. Doctor Who, another quintessentially British institution, is currently co-financed by Disney so that it can be distributed internationally on Disney+, although at least in that case the company allegedly has no editorial or narrative influence.

To put it frankly, the Hollywood ecosystem would be a lot healthier if there were more franchises like the modern James Bond series. So, naturally, it looks like James Bond is going to become like any other major Hollywood film franchise. The ink was barely dry on the press release announcing the deal before Amazon owner Jeff Bezos began soliciting fans for casting recommendations. Most of the names provided were tired suggestions a decade ago: Henry Cavill, Idris Elba, and so on.

From the character’s iconic tuxedo to his drink order to his taste in recreational activities, the James Bond franchise was always a top-shelf item. As the character is dragged into the modern franchise age, to effectively serve as a loss leader positioned near the checkout of the world’s largest retail company, the worry is that he no longer has a license to kill, but has instead been licensed to death.