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One of the things the producers will be keen on doing is differentiating the next Bond from Craig's and finding new elements of the character to explore. It's difficult given Craig's tenure showed us Bond's whole career as 007, but there are things a younger Bond might be suited to.
So what if the next Bond had a more hedonistic, thrill seeking side? You could have a version of the character not unlike that of Fleming's Bond at the start of TB - a good agent, but someone who is bored and dissatisfied when not on a mission. As a result he seeks excitement in his downtime and perhaps drinks a bit too much, gambles all night, drives too fast, sleeps around etc. which has an impact on his general fitness. When he's on missions he takes rather impulsive risks, takes a few beatings, and perhaps relies on gadgets too much. You could have Bond getting captured due to his risk taking at the end of the film, have his gadgets taken from him, and as a result he has to get out of the situation and save the day using his wits/being less impulsive.
It might be a cool twist on the usual Bond expectations, and it'd give something for a younger actor to sink their teeth into. Anyway, what does everyone think a younger Bond could give us that differentiates them from the Craig era?
Isn't that very similar to his arc in Casino Royale (and maybe QoS)? Brash hot shot who doesn't really care about the ramifications of his actions to cold assassin.
I've said this many many times before, but I would like for them to go further into what it means for someone in 2022/3/4/5 to be a government-sponsored assassin for the UK. We don't have to overdo the whole "is Bond still relevant"-thing, but the country and it's position in the world as well as the populaces relation to it's government are fundamentally different to what they were 60 years ago.
Skyfall gets at this. SPECTRE tried it and failed. I'd like them to take another shot at it. What does "For King and Country" even mean today? What does a Licence to Kill mean in a world in which the use of lethal force by law enforcment is a societal powder keg? What makes someone do this? Is he indeed a thrillseeker, who just can't get any of this in another line of work, but doesn't really care why or for whom he kills? Did he tumble into military life and just kind of kept at it, because he was so good at it? Is he a true believer?
Basically, I want the mission statement to be: "Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled. "Or not pulled. It's hard to know which in your pajamas." Who is this guy that makes calls like that?
Have a villain who questions this. Bring in a secondary character, for whom Bond's life and way of things are shocking (positively). Make it a problem for Bond to deal with/overcome that places that used to be part of the Empire no longer are. That the UK is no longer part of the EU. That maybe "smart, stable and sophisticated" currently isn't the first thing that comes to foreigner's minds when they think of the British.
I am rambling.
Broadly... kind of... I'd say Craig's Bond was definitely more brash and had a tendency to go against orders when he saw fit in his first two, but these aspects of his character carry over into the next three films. It's not as much about him becoming a cold assassin, or even necessarily a better agent. He's already very effective and continues to make decisions into SF which can be seen as 'against the grain' (ie. taking M to Skyfall manor). There's an element of these decisions leading to people's deaths - M, Fields, Solonge etc. but it's not as much due to impulsive decisions but is framed more in that tragic 'everything he comes into contact with dies' in his line of work.
No, that's all good stuff. This is expanding the idea slightly, but you could have this type of Bond - again, prone to boredom, a bit more hedonistic in his downtime, thrill seeking and impulsive - who is going through those questions in the film about his profession. Maybe he loves the danger of the job, but there's also that side to him that genuinely believes in King and Country. Maybe this side to him has been dampened after becoming a 00, his missions essentially comprised of assassinations and dangerous, but rather routine assignments (more along the lines of the opening of the GF novel for instance, which we know Bond isn't fond of). So he himself is more a 'blunt instrument' than Craig Bond's brash hot shot.
In that sense the film could be about James Bond learning to become 007 - not just an assassin with a thrill seeking complex, but a man who by the end of this film genuinely has to put his life on the line, take his ego out of the equation, and protect his country.
There's a lot you can do with that concept, and it opens doors for plot elements and villain ideas. Bond's reason for taking the main mission could be because he thinks it'll be an interesting and even 'fun' assignment that will curtail his boredom, which obviously will lead onto something bigger. Maybe the villain could call Bond out on his conflict, tell him he's just a thrill seeking assassin rather than someone who truly cares about anything.
Do you think Bond 26 could flip that on its head and explore a world that is trapped between the supposed prosperity of the past and a future that seemingly promises nothing but hardship?
Maybe a young James Bond who grew and learned from the older generation to become a weapon and a symbol for his country begins to feel he’s inherited a losing battle he has been ill-prepared for?
My issue with that article is that it makes a big, rather interesting point and yet at the same time says absolutely nothing. Bond should be more lighthearted... ok, what does this mean? Does it mean the films should be more fantastical, lean towards making Bond less two dimensional, getting him to make more quips every so often? It seems to cite SP and GE as modern, more lighthearted Bond films and says CR had a downbeat tone... well, that's highly simplified. SP and GE had some very dark ideas and moments within it, and CR is by and large a very escapist Bond film. The article says people don't like brutal, icy killers... well, I hate to break it to you, but Bond can be brutal and rather cold. It's literally his character. It even uses a rather vague reference to Top Gun Maverick to back up some sort of non-existent point as if Maverick and Bond are at all similar.
I do think the next Bond film will lean into that type of idea. We've had The Batman recently which touched on ideas such as the hero questioning whether he's truly doing any good, the villain being essentially one or two steps away from our hero etc. I suspect MI6,, perhaps save for individuals like M and Tanner, will be depicted in a harsher light. Not evil, but certainly not virtuous. I suspect we'll have a Bond who in some way questions what he's doing.
Of course I don't need a MR or DAD as the next film, but maybe they could make a film in the vein of TLD, who both has some lighter/"silly" and some darker/down-to-earth elements and then look what worked with the audience.
Agree with you both.
I never want them to go back to TWINE.
The next one will be a returning Brosnan and Richards as they tussle in bed in their old age and make bad sex puns and Christmas jokes for two hours. Barbara and MGW reached out and gave me this scoop just for you, my friend.
Wow, it's really come early this year, hasn't it.
If it also involves Nephew Ex Machina and 007 cracking the case because someone says something that someone else has also said, I'm game! Because nothing serves a Bond film better than Nickelodeon logic. ;-)
Except instead of Brosnan and Richards, it's Craig and Broccoli in bed.
Cut out the middleman.
J/k. ;)
Could be interesting as a Picasso-infused image?
1. Who else here who wants nostalgia (like References or callbacks to previous Bond films) to remain in the future Bond films?
Or
Do you think it's the reason why those filmmakers (particularly writers) ran out of ideas, because they're still holding up in the past?
2. Are you fine that Vesper/Tracy would not exist in the next timeline? Maybe for a Change or something new? To show that it's a new era.
I'm just interested to know from all of you here about your opinions.
Note: I think Carte Blanche would make a great inspiration for the next era, as it would also keep Bond in the modern/contemporary world in a right way.
It doesn't need to be serialized like the Craig Era again, please enough with that! Make Bond contemporary still, but the adventures were self contained, like those continuation novels that could also show that Bond could somehow evolve, why not apply it to the next films?
I mean we have Fleming, Gardner, Benson.
In the films, we have the Classic Era, the Craig Era, then the next (new) era.
Bond should not cling to the past but to look forward.
Though, I'm fine with the applications of some unused Fleming bits.
My proposal is keeping Bond in a modern world, but forget all of his past, and move on, and self contained adventures, just like comic books with different story in each volume.
I don't think it's due to lack of ideas. It may not even fully be due to nostalgia (although definitely there's an element of that). I think there are simply certain things associated with certain characters/franchises on such a deep cultural level that they become difficult to ignore when creating new films with said properties. Sherlock Holmes having a deer stalker hat, Superman's suit etc. With Bond it's things like the DB5, the tuxedo, martinis, gun barrel, the Bond theme etc.
The fact is there's always going to be an element of reinvention with every new Bond anyway, but many of these things come with the territory. The Craig era showed you could still have much of this iconography but do something different with them. I mean, the end of SF is an example - it feels familiar and right seeing that old office design, the characters we know, Bond smiling over the theme as he returns to work, the gunbarrel. Narratively it's doing something fresh with the old iconography. It works.
I think where these callbacks failed were where they felt uninspired or badly utilised for me. There was no need, for instance, to design Safin's lair in the same style as DN's, and it probably would have been more interesting if it had been different. They could have benefitted from more of a reinterpretation of SPECTRE and Blofeld instead of the constant callbacks to facial scars, a lazy interpretation of the meetings we say in the 60s films etc.
It just depends on what Bondian elements they want to use and what they do with them.
I've heard cases for having the Vesper backstory established with every Bond the same way the death of Batman's parents is in every new iteration of that character. I dunno though, I think for Bond 26 it's best to try and keep it as separate from the Craig era as possible, but Bond is a character with a lot of tragedy in his life. I'm sure a very subtle reference could work while still keeping it ambiguous.
I wouldn't personally think too hard about those sorts of things though, at least if it's not relevant to the individual films. Obviously Tracy didn't exist at all in the Craig timeline so... meh.
Didn't like Carte Blache as a book, but it does have some interesting ideas in there. I'm sure you could have a version of M who isn't the Head of MI6 but Head of the 00 section (actually that'd be interesting and open up some good story ideas). It's not a radical departure, and in itself wouldn't necessarily touch that iconography of Bond that I talked about before.
It’s nice to see Carte Blanche get some ideas and recognizing for the future of James Bond. I know what some people think about the characterization of James Bond in the story. However, I really think that it truly built Bond’s modern day world and supporting characters well. I’d like to see some ideas from it be used in a future Bond movie for the future. The number one thing that needs to be changed in Bond’s immediate future is the writing. Stop with artsy Oscar bait writers and CERTAINLY STOP with Purvis and Wade! They are dried up. Maybe look at Anthony Horowitz for a future writer.
Horrowitz has only really written scripts for television though, hasn't he? And I don't mean Golden Age, 'cinematic' post Sopranos type stuff but standard BBC period dramas. Not saying they're badly written (although not my cup of tea) but I think writing for film or even certain types of television series nowadays can be a different thing altogether than that sort of writing. Heck, writing a Bond story for a novel vs a film can be very different. So I don't think he'd necessarily be the best bet for a great script per say.
Which writer they get will be interesting though. I don't mind Purvis and Wade - both actually have a good grasp of Fleming, and not all of the script problems of the last two films necessarily stemmed from them. It depends on what kind of Bond story they want to tell. If they wanted to lean more into a 'cat and mouse' type film with a bit of mystery (more akin to FRWL) someone like Gillian Flynn might be cool. Krysty Wilson-Cairns is an up and coming scriptwriter who seems adept at working with other writer/directors. I can see someone like her being drafted in. There are many others who might be a bit more left field but might do something interesting.
That's the thing that I wish the next Era of Bond would use as an inspiration.
It's a bit like the new Batman film having a Wayne Tower instead of a Wayne Manor. Or the Batcave being an abandoned tube station. Or Gordon being a Lieutenant instead of a Commissioner. It's different in the sense it allows the filmmakers to do something different, but essentially the way these places look visually, their function in the story, and the relationships between characters are what we're used to seeing from the series.
I don't mind the subtle callbacks (50 year old Macallan, a favourite of yours) but I hate the overt ones (Fields covered in oil)
At times it felt like in the later Daniel films, they were trying too hard to make his Bond feel more traditional and the era lost a bit of its edge in return.
It's part of the reason I hope whoever they cast as Bond #7 is a somewhat conventional choice, then they won't need to retread old ground, almost to convince us this man is James Bond.
As for the Vesper/Tracy thing, I'd rather we see Bond #7 fall in love with Gala Brand instead. They could finally adapt a version of that character in the film series