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Most of the dramatic meat is gone.
This is the hole we are stuck in because they just couldn't wait to shoot their Blofeld wad everywhere at the earliest possibility.
What they should've done was say to Craig we need a three picture commitment and then gone:
SP - Franz Oberhauser as SPECTRE number 2 and Blofeld merely alluded to or shown in shadow like the good old days. Basically TB.
B25 - Set up the antagonism between Blofeld building to...
B26 - Adaptation of YOLT and final showdown in the Garden of Death.
If Craig wouldn't commit to that then just have made SP a standalone film and let him go and start the Blofeld arc with the new Bond.
The key mistake they made is that they had a massively successful Bond they'd be mad to let go and they couldn't resist doing the whole Blofeld thing with him once they got the rights. The problem is he was approaching the end of his tenure so they decided (extremely misguidedly) to force as much of the Blofeld stuff as they could cram into one film in case he didn't come back.
The annoying thing is if Mclory had died before QOS then you'd have to think we'd be in a far better place now. The Craig era could've been a 60s rivalling SPECTRE and Blofeld slow burn instead of SPECTRE tribute act Quantum being introduced only to be airbrushed out of history by the most hamfisted retrofitting ever.
The guy was a pain in the arse even when it came to dying at the right time! In fact you could say SP and the shambolic narrative mess we're lumbered with now is Mclory's final revenge.
Therefore, even if they recast and do either a hard or soft reboot we can still expect to face the prospect of more muddled and directionless leadership from EON.
I fully agree. Hence I think it's best to continue this....'Craig-timeline' and slowly fade out the narrative backgrounds and background histories of characters over the course of one or two Bond films. So that Craig's successor basically can be the new Bond in the very same Craig-timeline.
Bang on the money.
Can you imagine any other company that did turnover in the hundreds of millions having a forward strategy of about 18 months-2 years?
No vision or idea for what's going to happen next week, let alone ten years down the line.
Sometimes I wish Babs was a bit more American in her approach. The cosy family business schpiel sounds all very appealing, but a bit more ruthless corporate target setting and go-getting would be welcome at times like this.
Those are some matter of fact statements for someone making patently false claims.
In my case, it's because I don't have the patience to wait potentially another 6 years before seeing a new approach. I'd rather we get it sooner, especially after this long 4 year wait.
I want the best for my favourite franchise, as do many here. I've enjoyed the Craig run, even though I dislike the last film immensely. More than anything, that film made me realize that every good thing must come to an end. Brosnan was dismissed a bit soon perhaps, but retrospectively the recasting was just the shot in the arm that the series needed. We're there again imho. Many sense it I feel, apart from the die hard Craigites.
"Ladies & gentlemen? Please welcome my chiropractor Mr Hinx!"
Excellent line.
The script was charmless.
Yes, but without a serious creative rethink, then 'I want a change' just means replacing Craig. That is very likely to equal 'more of the same' with just a different actor in the role.
Or are you satisfied going back to the inanities of the Brosnan era? Yes we got regular films but they were to all intents and purposes straight to DVD, bargain-bucket garbage.
What is achieved if they just ditch Craig (and even the Scooby Gang) and bring in Fassbender or Aiden Turner, if Purvis and Wade are still churning out their cr*p?
EON need to get a grip on the series and have a more strategic view of what they want to achieve. Critically they need to build a high quality writing team who will (if this is the route they continue to want to pursue) develop purposeful and engaging multi-picture story arcs. Even if they go back to stand alone movies with minimal nods to continuity (which would be my preference) they need better writers.
The series always undergoes a bit of a revitalization when there is a new actor, reboot or not. Sometimes that change may not impress everyone, but I'm still a believer in shaking it up from time to time. That's why this series has survived for so long.
Of late they've tried to follow the direct continuity model that has been so popular with Marvel and the like. I've said it before and I'll say it again: that approach is more likely than not to constrain the franchise and potentially limit its useful life as a cinematic entity, especially when they drag the bloody story out over 15 odd years. So when I hear of rumours that EON is thinking of selling now, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. They're boxed in due to their own decisions.
The trick with Bond has always been the ability to recast without causing too much strife or palaver. The sooner they do it, the sooner the public moves on from this 'timeline' story and the better.
Not really. Feige isn't doing anything profoundly special. He just does his job very well, which is expected of any paid professional. EoN have been failing at doing their job effectively for long enough. They need to start giving a damn and start behaving like actual producers again.
Craigraker?
Turnerraker?
Actually, McClory died in 2006.
According to "The James Bond Archives" it was actually Mendes and/or Logan who insisted in having SPECTRE since, according to Logan, "Bond should always fight Blofeld". They talked to EON about this as the script was being written, and EON said they knew they would resolve the rights issues.
Long story short, it's all Mendes fault, and EON are to blame for pleasing Mendes and Logan.
I know people give P&W a lot of flack, but the Blofeld as Bond's "foster brother" angle was all Mendes and Logan. The "cuckoo bird" was an intriguing concept to him.
"Once we’d gone back to Bond’s childhood in Skyfall, I was fascinated to seek out all the other references to what happened next, and the truth is there are very, very few. He gets brought up by his aunt, and gets sent away during summers, or winters, I can’t remember which holiday it was in Fleming, to spend time with Hannes Oberhauser in the Austrian Alps. It says something very noncommittal like, he was a father figure to me at a time when I happened to need one. That’s it. That was the clue we had and that’s what we took. What if there was a natural child who had been pushed out, cuckoo in the nest by the blue-eyed good-looking talented skier and good climber, and he was a feeble little weakling, doing his homework upstairs. That figure felt like someone whose story I wanted to know."
http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/18-things-know-spectre/
Fair point but they didn't get the rights till 2013.
Actually that makes it all even more hamfisted. With Mclory gone in late 06 gone they must've fancied their chances of bagging the rights so why did they go ahead and create poor man's SPECTRE Quantum? Just bide your time. Mclory was mental and lived to remake TB no matter how much it cost him in legal costs. No way his estate would be bothered to do that if they could cash in and flog the rights.
I hold EON almost entirely responsible.
It was EON who were so desperate for Mendes they delayed production by a year and then let him do anything he wanted up to the point where he was almost literally setting fire to millions of dollars and then putting it out by pissing over Fleming's grave.
It was EON who failed to supervise Logan properly and without Pascal and Fiennes putting their feet down Christ alone knows how much worse it could have been.
It was EON who have final say on everything thus you can blame Mendes and Logan all you want but these things wouldn't be possible if EON didn't sign off on them.
After the all time low of the series when EON failed to control their director and signed off on ridiculous decisions that should never have been allowed they seemed to have learned their lesson yet it's only taken them 3 successful films before complacency has set in and they've repeated exactly the same mistakes.
A classic Lib Dem!
Again -- no, no, no.
Eon was NEVER going to do Bond 24 (eventually SPECTRE) in 2014. Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig in a joint interview said a Sony distribution executive who promised that didn't know what he was talking about. Broccoli, in a separate interview with the Los Angeles Times made a point of saying she was never going to hurry up production for a studio again.
The links to both of these stories were posted in this thread more than once.
Why does this myth persist?
Thanks for clearing that up. To this day, I've still assumed we got a full year-long wait solely so they could wait for Mendes.
You're right about that, and that's what my post implied.
Peoples affection for the series manifests itself in many ways. Mendes doesn't 'get' Bond IMO - at least his interpretation of the character doesn't resonate with me. SF amply demonstrated that to me. But that doesn't mean he has any less affection for the series and character than any of us.
I do get the sense that Mendes did SP against his better judgement and that it was obviously not a pleasurable experience for him. May be by the end of SP his love for Bond was somewhat diminished.
One more passage from this Mendes' interview illustrates the importance of the family element in SP:
Skyfall and Spectre are films about family.
"For me the last movie [Skyfall] was about mothers. It was about two sons fighting over a mother, ultimately Silva and Bond, the chosen son and the rejected son fighting over Judi’s M. That was, in many ways, the family story of the movie, and then the fact that Bond had lost his own parents, his own mother and there was a gravestone and the first conversation about being an orphan with her, all of that was tied in. Here [Spectre], it’s all about fathers, it’s about her [Lea Seydoux's] father, it’s about his surrogate father, it’s about Christoph’s father, and that was a very deliberate decision."
No need to apologize, I'm glad we share the same point of view.