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100% agree with you.
I've heard that Fukunaga has been screentesting actresses with Craig.
Also, it's Thursday - the day Baz (at least used to) drop scoops. So if he were to drop a casting scoop, he'd only have three more articles left to drop on Thursday night/Friday morning of the following dates: 15th, 22nd, 29th March
Interesting.
I would love to be a fly on the wall while this is going on.
You dirty old Bazzer!
He he .....i'm afraid you've caught me with more than my hands up,Nackers !
And yet Norway is filming in march...
So When is the press conference?
How many times have you been caught with your "hands up nackers"??
+1.
Whenever someone slams EON and claims to be a huge Bond fan, my Geiger counter begins to make noise.
Marvel and Disney are the McDonald's of the big screen: films aimed to guys on T-shirts who care next to nothing for their appearance, eat nachos and cheese during the movies, shout and applaud aloud whenever a character kills the villain or they see the LucasFilms logo. I'll apologize in advance if I'm hurting feelings, but I can't stop to see those "great" productions done in two years or less as something extremely vulgar to my tastes.
EON, on the other hand, is the Carnegie Hall/Opera Palace of the big screen: aimed to guys who feel confident enough to mimic the Bond looks wearing a decent suit for important events, who are gentlemanly and try to enjoy their low-budget version of the huge lifestyle Bond has. Fleming came from an upper-crust family, Cubby Broccoli was working class but he knew what kind of audiences should appeal, and had a great director like Terence Young who captured Fleming's idea quite well. Bond -like Tosca- is not for everyone.
Back in 1998, when everyone was collecting Dragon Ball Z stickers, I was the black sheep who loved the James Bond film. "James Bond Jr?", they inquired. "Nope, James Bond. GoldenEye", I replied. Sooner or later, everyone was trying to catch a glimpse of the movie on TV. And while they didn't become Bond fans, they knew who Bond was at a very early age.
The money the films have made since LTK should prove that they are as competent as could be. I didn’t like or love all of them, but I can’t argue with the numbers.
So, reply to the rest of my post instead of isolating that one sentence!
You can be critical of EON and still be a Bond fan. I hated SP but that doesn't make me hate Bond. A lot of people here are misinterpreting the criticism.
No one wants EON to be like Marvel, or Disney. The criticism stems from the fact that EON was given plenty of time to create a competent script, and they're having issues right up until the last minute which created two delays. EON of today isn't really like the EON of before.
I don't know why people keep misunderstanding that just because we think EON has made some incompetent decisions, doesn't mean we want to destroy them; doesn't mean we've always hated them; doesn't mean we're spreading negativity.
Secondly, Bond fans have no superiority over other film fans. People of any background can love both Marvel, and James Bond. Both films play to the movie goer's fantasy. Bond just does it in a higher brow way. You leave both films feeling entertained. Both never changed my perspective on the world or anything meaningful.
Political forces. Creative forces.
We have to accept that now, with the action film market so buoyant a character like Bond could become irrelevant if they force films out every 2-3 years. Bond films have always been an event, but if they made them every two years now it wouldn't be an event in the slightest. And that is due to competition.
Barbara isn't being lacklustre, she is as keen as ever to give Bond to the world. But it's a different world to when Cubby was around.
As for incompetent decisions, Eon have been making them since the 60s. Thunderball suffered from being rushed. Issues with the editing and the dubbing were all over the film. That film needed six more months.
The script has had re-writes, yes. But so many Bond films have had them. We are just more aware of it now, because of the internet age.
As someone said, to have kept this franchise alive for over 50 years is a miracle. An absolute miracle. But its a miracle that is harder to perform as the years go by.
Spot on @dominicgreene
Meanwhile, MGM could sort out the change from Sony to another company, which as we know no was causing some problems and we know that Purvis and Wade were working on a script. Eon were obviously working on getting a director for the new film, which wouldn't have been a quick thing. They then managed to get Danny Boyle in March 2018, who brought on Hodge, so P&W's script was out and he was going to work on a new one, which takes time. We were getting some casting info so everything was full steam ahead, until Boyle's leaving/firing was announced in August 2018.
Then his replacement was announced in September 2018, Cary Fukunaga, so they probably met with him about what he wanted to do and got P&W to do a new draft of the script. They also announced the February 14 2020, which was them (not just Eon) probably getting ahead of themselves. Then they obviously realised that wasn't going to be the case and producers and Fukunaga probably felt the script wasn't up to scratch. I mean Craig could've also said the same as we all know he has a well-listened to opinion in all this. It also should be mentioned that apparently they've wanted to get Scott Z. Burns for ages, and were trying to get him to come help with script stuff in December 2018, but because he was busy with his own film, he said he couldn't do it. So, they decided to wait because they probably thought it would be worth it, so when they eventually got him, they spoke with MGM and Universal and got the release date moved a few months later, as that's exactly how behind they are. So it makes sense.
And with the news that filming in Norway is starting at the end of the month, filming itself has only been delayed by mere weeks. So in my opinion, at the end of the day, this has all been valid and I find these criticisms against Eon to be kind of unfair. Yes, Eon isn't what it used to be but let's be honest, the film industry isn't what it used to be. Things happen that get in the way, but we're mere weeks away from filming and the press conference is right around the corner so can we just get excited now and stop dwelling on things that at the end of the day don't matter now.
Let's not forget ignorance is bliss and we've chosen as fans to follow the production as much as we can and are probably the only ones analysing each and every move as things happen. There are loads of fans out there that don't pay attention to this and are happy to wait, so of course when we're analysing things this much we're gonna feel the gap a lot longer than they are but I don't see it as a reason to get annoyed at Eon or Barbara or Michael because they're just doing their job and trying to deliver the best film they can and I bet you any money that with everything happening that I've listed above, any producer would be doing the same thing.
And yes you can criticise Eon, but I personally don't feel it's justified.
Wow I didn't realise this was so long, if anyone wants to quickly know what this is all about. I've just summed up all the reasons for the delay and why it's not that big of a a problem.
Spot on.
1. having had to wait so long between films
2. still read today that the script is not ready yet one month before filming begins
That said, it doesn't necessarily mean Bond 25 won't be a great film, but ...
Honestly, Marvel only got away with it because they could distract audiences from the over saturation of their films by technically releasing stories about different characters. We’re not lining up to see the 28th Iron Man film, we’re seeing Thor, then Black Panther, then Captain America, then The Avengers, etc, etc.
The point is that EON is Bond. EON was born for Bond, and even UA told Cubby and Harry to dedicate exclusively to those films knowning it takes a lot of hard word to make them. EON has flows, but even with that there's not anyone around that can simply do it better.
Writing a Bond script is a very hard task: how do you please new generations and make the films feel as movies closer to the cinematic (SPECTRE) or literary Bond (Casino Royale)? You know you can't just have Bond preventing the robbing of a bank, you have to go way deeper than that, a national/worldwide security threat that an MI6 agent would go after. EON did right in scrapping Boyle out, Babs and Michael are following the advice of their father - that they should have the last word in anything and "not screw it up". They knew it would lose time if they ditched Hodge's idea and went back to P&W but I'm quite sure they had a very good reason to do it - and if Trance is the "most Bondian Boyle work, I'm quite happy to see him go. A great name is not a guaranty of efficiency, Anthony Burgess wanted Bond and Kissinger naked and a boxing kangaroo in TSWLM. Whenever Cubby (or Barbara now) had to decide between delivering a floppy Bond film "in time" or delaying it because changes had to be made and deliver a better Bond film, they opt for the latter.
I totally see Bond as something that can't get mixed or compared with other franchises. Yes, they play to the movie goer's fantasy, but they are both different fantasies. I do think the creative process and the target is different in both cases. That's mostly why I say it's irrelevant to say Marvel does movies every year and EON takes four or five years to make a Bond film. Bond films are stylish, and make that style noticeable on screen is much more than developing a script.
We are so much aware of everything now that are unable to enjoy ourselves. We become judges, not spectators. And we are already slamming a movie a year before its release when we don't know the title, the plot or the cast. Hell, we've been thinking of the seventh Bond since at least 2008 where nothing indicated Craig was leaving.
In this year Bond 25, everyone has plenty of time to discover (or re-read) Fleming, Amis, Gardner and Benson, rewatch the old movies, etc. Back in the 1970s or 1980s, two years was a hell of a time to wait for Bond and all we knew was thanks to newspapers or TV. We had to wait for a film to be rescreened, shown on TV and home video was expensive. Now we have control of those things and we can pick the day where we want to watch a Bond film or read a Bond novel.