No, Mr Bond: Why Jeff Bezos won’t be the 007 villain fans fear

Many are worried that Amazon’s £6bn deal to buy MGM will take a brutal laserbeam to the integrity of the Bond franchise. But maybe it’s always just been ‘content’? And whisper it, but can it actually get any worse asks Louis Chilton

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (AHMET SEL/SIPA/Shutterstock)

It’s been a rough couple of decades to be a James Bond fan. There was the glorious rebirth that was Casino Royale (2006); then came the disappointments. First, the gaudy, cluttered Quantum of Solace, then the nostalgia-heavy Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), both of which dazzled on release but whose reputations dropped like a faulty Union Jack parachute soon after.

The forthcoming release of No Time to Die, meanwhile, has been delayed so many times that I’m starting to doubt whether it exists at all. Bond fans must also contend with the changing tides of public opinion – the growing sense that 007’s tuxedoed lasciviousness and dry machismo are no longer desirable or acceptable in a 21st-century screen protagonist. Now, to top it all off, it’s been revealed that the rights to Bond – at least, the 50 per cent belonging to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer – are being bought by Amazon for £6bn. It’s no wonder Bond diehards seem shaken. And stirred. But personally, I don’t think it’s the doomsday plot that some seem to think it is.

It’s easy to see why fans have expressed concern over the deal. For one thing, there’s the ethical stink surrounding Amazon generally, emanating from criticisms of the online retail giant’s alleged labour practices. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff “richest man in the world” Bezos, wouldn’t make a bad Bond villain himself – a sort-of cross between Jonathan Pryce’s villainous media mogul Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies and Moonraker’s Hugo Drax, the uber-rich industrialist who shares Bezos’s strange dreams of colonising space.

But there are also creative concerns about handing over the reins of a multi-billion-dollar film franchise to a company more at home with cardboard than car chases. Bond is inherently cinematic. Its action sequences and shoot-outs demand the immersive flash and boom of a cinema auditorium; streaming a Bond film on your mobile phone’s Amazon Prime app (what one might call the “For Your Eyes Only” experience) would rob it of most of its spectacle. Another fear – articulated by Skyfall screenwriter John Logan in a recent New York Times op-ed – is that Amazon will interfere creatively with the franchise. Or else, it could try to flood the market with Bond projects, as Disney has done with Star Wars and Marvel, stick a drill in the ground and keep going ’til the oil runs dry.

“Bond isn’t just another franchise, not a Marvel or a DC,” insists Logan. “It is a family business that has been carefully nurtured and shepherded through the changing times by the Broccoli/Wilson family. Bond is not content, and he’s not a mere commodity. He has been a part of our lives for decades... That’s why we don’t have a mammoth Bond Cinematic Universe, with endless anaemic variations of 007 sprouting up on TV or streaming or in spin-off movies.” Despite everything, however, it’s hard to get too worked up over the franchise’s artistic integrity. On some level, Bond has always been “content”.

Many of the criticisms that get levelled against today’s big franchise hitters could have been hurled at the Bond films decades ago. Marvel films are rightly condemned for their repetitiveness – squeezing an endless procession of colourfully garbed superfolk into the same formulaic story structure, the same quippy dialogue patterns, the same hero’s journey repeated ad nauseum. But Bond is just as obedient to formula. Rather than make this a weakness, however, it becomes a selling point. Fans come to expect a constantly shuffling deck of fast cars, exotic (but only superficially explored) locales, photogenic love interests and post-coital one-liners.

Some of the basic tenets of the cinematic art – quality dialogue, convincing performances, nuanced or meaningful storytelling – are often found lacking, with Bond opting instead for the broad, the visceral and the titillating. On the plus side, recent Bond entries have at least (save for an occasional ice palace or surfing set-piece) avoided the over-reliance on garish CGI that blights so much of what we now call cinema.

Despite their structural and aesthetic similarities, the quality of Bond films has also wildly fluctuated down the years. It takes a particularly blinkered enthusiast to try and sell you on the honest merits of Moonraker or Die Another Day. Surely no amount of interference from Amazon Studios will result in anything more execrable than A View to a Kill?

‘Die Another Day’ (2002), Pierce Brosnan’s final Bond film, was lambasted by critics upon its release (MGM)

The Amazon deal is not the end of the world, or even, necessarily, the end of Bond as we know it. Fans can take a modicum (or should that be quanticum?) of solace in the fact that before the pandemic hit, Amazon Studios had a commendable record of giving films proper theatrical releases (at least compared to Netflix). It would take a major cultural shift for a Bond film to go straight to streaming – no studio would want that blood on their hands. MGM’s ownership of Bond was also only partial: the Broccoli family (via Eon Productions) retains a power of veto over everything Bond-related. If Amazon go hog-wild and start commissioning spin-offs, reboots and Young Bond: The Animated Series, you can be assured it will only be with the Broccolis’ blessing.

With No Time to Die, James Bond reaches the end of an era; Daniel Craig’s ageing and jaded 007 embarks on his final mission. When Bond returns, there’s no telling what he’ll look like – though it’s likely he’ll keep moving away from the toxic masculinity and womanising that defined his earlier, randier escapades. He might even take the form of a woman himself (or Tom Hardy, or Idris Elba, or Tom Hiddleston, or Regé-Jean Page, depending on which bookmaker’s stab-in-the-dark you want to believe).

At the end of the day, the real changes threatening Bond’s status quo are not corporate, but social. Amazon or not, Ian Fleming’s unkillable super-spy must work out how to survive in a world that no longer finds him aspirational. Meanwhile, it’s starting to seem like there is no ceiling to Amazon’s ambitions for growth. For Bezos, the world is never enough.

No Time To Die is released on 30 September