James Bond is going through 99 problems right now, and Jeff Bezos is one of them. The franchise that has reigned over Hollywood since the 1960s has finally hit a rough patch that’s even worse than Roger Moore’s era as 007. Meanwhile, fans still clamor over the absence of Henry Cavill, as the 41-year-old actor is all but done with playing the MI6 superspy.
However, Cavill’s missed opportunity is not the saddest part about the Bond franchise. Jeff Bezos’s power move as Amazon annexes EON Productions under its wings has wrecked, shocked, disheartened, and terrified Hollywood, critics, and fans alike. Now, further scrutiny shows that Cavill being shunned as a Bond contender and Amazon buying out 007 may just be linked, after all.
Henry Cavill snub could be linked to Amazon buy-out
Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the long-time keepers of the James Bond franchise, are known to be threateningly protective when it comes to the IP that their father built in the 1960s. So much so, in fact, that Broccoli made her distaste for those at Amazon loud and clear when The Wall Street Journal quoted her as telling a friend that their executives were “f**king idiots.”
Obviously, this did not fare well with Jeff Bezos, who aggressively moved to take over the IP by buying out the family business for a mere billion dollars. Now that Amazon holds all the rights to Bond, EON Productions, and parent studio MGM, it can do pretty much anything it wants, including spin-offs about side characters or prequels about villains or disappointing game shows.
It was also reported that Amazon had proposed several names for the next Bond after Daniel Craig‘s phenomenal 15-year ownership of the character (via The Hollywood Reporter). However, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson never settled on one. As the franchise now splutters on without an actor, a script, or a director, the fans are left to wonder if Skyfall was really the last Bond film that will ever exist in pop culture memory.
Amazon buys out James Bond in a shocking move
It was one of Albert Broccoli’s final wishes that James Bond never be sold out by an outsider, given how he built the franchise from the ground up since the very first film in 1962. His heirs, Barbara Broccoli and half-sibling Michael G. Wilson, were mere children when Dr. No came out, and they have been brought up on the sets of Bond ever since. 007 is in their blood, so to speak.
Before his death, the godfather of the Bond franchise and the overseer of EON Productions that housed the superspy all these years reportedly told his children: “Don’t let anybody else screw it up. You can screw it up if you want to, but don’t let other people screw it up.” As such, it came as a shock more than a surprise when they announced the sale to Amazon for chump change.
Moreover, John Cork, who wrote the Bond bible for EON in the mid-1990s, claimed in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter:
People think they know James Bond because they know the iconography of the martini and the gun and the gadgets. But there is a very particular set of things that occur below the surface that have kept the character resonating for over 60 years. There’s a line from the novel Goldfinger about how high tension was Bond’s ‘natural way of life’ and that ‘pressure and danger relaxed him’. Amazon is going to need to get people in the room who understand that.
If Amazon can truly get like-minded people in a room who can consistently churn out good Bond films, it would be an ideal situation for everyone involved. However, considering Amazon’s previous track record with spy films like Citadel or franchise IPs like the Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power – there isn’t much to hope or expect from the studio just yet.
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