It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
And honestly, that would be something. Unfortunately my experience of other media suggests that later writers will often ignore & replace significant events like these not written by the original author, feeling that they could do it better.
We'll just have to see how it goes.
I seriously doubt screenwriters most of the time write these scripts thinking it’s “better” than what Fleming wrote. Most of the time it’s either about just wanting to try something different from what was done before, or in cases like GOLDFINGER alter things because of adapting for the format that is visual medium.
Bond in the novel never sees Tilly painted gold, he’s only told that after the fact, and that works for the novel because readers can visualize it for themselves. But for a visual medium like film it makes more sense to have the audiences be with Bond actually discovering Tilly on that bed, rather than it be just something told to him after the fact.
Either like that, or he dies from liver cirrhosis. :))
There is no point. Let them stand on their own.
M says to Bond " welcome back, 007. Pity about Swann."
Bond replies saying "the relationship didn't work out. It was agreed she had full custody of Mathilde. It's for the best."
M nods in agreement.
Bond's family is never mentioned again. This allows the writers to preserve continuity from NTTD and to avoid rehashing Bond's family. It's a clean slate moving forward.
Bond is the same Bond as Craig's Bond. He has the physical and emotional scars of NTTD but we get all that stuff over with in the first act of Bond 26. Once Bond has recovered and back as a fully fit 00 agent he's the established Bond with no more emotional baggage. Clean slate. No mention of Swann, his daughter, SPECTRE.
I think it's worth using SPECTRE in a future film but not in Bond 26.
Fleming flirted with and implied these very things. FRWL was not a happy ending, and DN was never assured.
Yes, Fleming considered killing Bond and may have considered killing Leiter, but that's not relevant to the point I was making.
"Bond scholar John Griswold notes that in the original draft of the story, Fleming killed Leiter off in the shark attack; when Naomi Burton, Fleming's US agent with Curtis Brown protested about the death of the character, Fleming relented and Leiter lived, albeit missing an arm and half a leg."
https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Felix_Leiter_(Literary)
Thanks, but it’s still not relevant to the point that I was making, which was
I don't think I knew that, thank you, that's very interesting. Makes sense too, there's kind of no point to Felix surviving.
I tend to think they should have killed him off in LTK especially. It's a revenge thriller- kill the guy. There's no payoff to his not dying; an unusual case of Eon sticking to the original text a bit too much.
This would raise more questions than answers.
How did Bond survive the missile? How did they assure that Heracles would not be transmitted to Madeleine and Mathilde? Why would Bond keep working for MI6, if he had already quit the service deciding the life of an assassin is not for him (even after him and Madeleine had broken up in Matera he was still in retirement), and why would he risk his life knowing he has a young daughter somewhere?
As for the last point, yes, lots of parents risk their lives despite having young children (soldiers, policemen, firemen and so on), but him dismissing everything with a throwaway line at the beginning feels very insensitive, as if he couldn't care less about Mathilde growing up without a father, especially after he'd already missed her first years.
Exactly. Audiences have become so accustomed to the idea of different iterations of characters that’s why they’ll have no trouble with being ready for a new Bond with a clean slate.
It’s only a few Bond fans that I notice having difficulty to this idea of Bond existing as different iterations with each actor. As if they’re so used to this idea of one large continuity spanning decades that they wanted to see the same apply to Craig’s, as if we’ll see Fiennes, Whishaw, and Harris continue on much like Lee, Llewelyn, and Maxwell did back in the old days. Those days are gone.
I do find it curious: it's not as if anyone expects the next Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes to be in the same continuity as all the previous ones.
And Bond for me was never like that anyway. I never thought that the guy going after Sanchez had flown into space on a shuttle and driven a hover gondola around Venice a few years earlier.
A bit of short term continuity is great between films, so they're interested in Vesper or whatever; and an in-joke which lots of people will remember is also good, like the DB5 turning up, but no-one cares if Bond met Dikko Henderson in a film in the 60s or whatever.
Sherlock Holmes is closer, but the Conan Doyle stories are the official canon. I’ve seen some deliberately different versions which don’t stick to the Doyle stories, but I’ve never seen a series where Holmes dies, then comes back next episode alive and well with no explanation, running a different continuity.
I hate to be a broken record but in 2012 Batman retired, in 2016 Batman was an old man turned cruel, and in 2022 he was a young man figuring it out. It isn't that confusing. People understand different actor different guy same character same idea.
I mean I hate to tell you, but each Bond film isn't exactly telling a hugely different story to the last.
I think he died in that Ian McKellen one didn't he? Or he was about to. That wasn't the last Holmes adaptation.
Batman retired in the Dark Knight Rises (and in fact everyone else in that world thought he had died); in the next film -made by the same producers- he was alive again and no one got confused.
A Shakespeare play being retold again and again is a terrible comparison to the current situation with Bond, which is why I called you on it. It's not part of a particular series of Sherlock Holmes films, is it? It's totally non-canonical, too, like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. The books remain top-tier canon to the public. With the character now in the public domain we'll continue to get different versions, sometimes overlapping like the Ritchie/ Downey Jr period-set films out at the same time as Gatiss & Moffat's modern-day Sherlock, and the US-set show Elementary, but none of these versions have the same weight as the original books to the public. Sherlock and Elementary were both successful with the general public and have their own particular fan-base(s), but they're very much alternate versions with their own distinct identity, and not what you think of when people say "Sherlock Holmes". And in no way can I imagine they would kill-off Holmes in a big emotional episode, only to start the next episode with Holmes alive and well with no explanation, totally ignoring the previous story(s).
Again, it's not a good comparison. You're one of the smartest posters here, but you have a weakness for resorting to glib arguments to ridicule points of view that don't match your own, and you deserve to be called on it. The Hamlet comparison was nonsense, Holmes is more comparable to Bond, but it still doesn't really work - the is no film series of Holmes that has taken over from the original stories in the public's consciousness the way Eon's films have done for Bond, and certainly there isn't one which has killed off their protagonist then returned to business as usual.
On the other hand...
Batman is much more comparable to Bond. I've talked before about the way I feel they're different:
I'll add that since hiring Nolan for Batman Begins, the Batman films have sold themselves as being 'director's visions' of Batman, working to adapt the character from comics to the big screen, usually by trying to make him grittier and more 'real-world' in Batman-centric films. Both Nolan and Reeves have been working on the issue of taking the very stylised and fantastical version of reality depicted in the comics and making it feel credible in live-action. Bond directors don't have the same degree of challenge because the character and his world are closer to reality, but that does mean that the Bond character and world has a weaker visual identity to Batman's: the early Bond films have those great set-designs from Ken Adam, and they made the gadget-laden DB5 iconic, but the franchise has sometimes been embarrassed about the fantasy elements; on the other hand, remove the fantastical from Bond and he's too real-world and bland, just another spy with a gun. If only they had kept the scar on his cheek from the novels, that would have helped. Instead we've got the DB5 back again and again as it is so widely identified with the character, one of the few visual cues you're in a Bond film.
Back to the point: even though Nolan and Reeve's series have been seen as distinct 'director's visions' and not part of an ongoing series by the studio, they had a ten year gap between TDKR and Reeve's The Batman. I think the public needed that gap after TDKR, and I've argued that Eon probably always planned a longer gap between killing Bond off in NTTD and bringing him back in Bond 26 just to prevent the kind of backlash Sony faced from rebooting the franchise only a few years after the final Rami film. You can kill-off a hero and then immediately reboot him, but you risk the last film looking inconsequential and damage the feeling of reality, which is always slightly tenuous, imo, in any fiction. If you damage the sense of reality too much the audience loses their emotion connection to the material, and then you're just relying on the film's jokes and fast pace to keep them amused until the end, and Eon haven't done that since Brosnan.
Everyone here worries that Eon will make a creative decision that will damage their ability to care about the next film in the Bond series. What kind of thing that is... that varies from person to person. I thought NTTD was very well made and had some good things in it (it looks great, for starters), but I was totally unmoved by their big emotional beats, and the action and pacing has not been enough to carry me through on subsequent viewings. I know some people loved the film and thought killing Bond off was brave and brilliant, other people cried and got angry for Bond's death... I got nothing, it just felt like a gimmick to me. I used to see this kind of thing done in comics all the time, and it wears thin.
I don't think NTTD will kill the franchise, and I don't think that we need a line in the script to reference the events of NNTD. I do think killing Bond is line that they shouldn't have crossed if they were planning to bring him back straight after.
Well it's a fair point, but equally I don't think a lot of cinema goers care all that much about the technicalities of which films are in a series or not. If you told a lot of them McKellen was an older version of Cumberbatch's Holmes, despite the obvious disparity in setting, I think a lot would take it onboard quite happily and just not worry. It's not all that different from Bond being perpetually young. I'm sure there's an awful lot of people who, if you told them NSNA wasn't a 'proper' Bond film, would happily go on watching it.
You're right about Hamlet being lots of disparate adaptations of the same text, but I don't think we're even arguing from different sides of this. My point was that everyone but a few Bond fans seem happily able to tell when continuity starts again, as it does with every new Hamlet adaptation. And the idea of them being 'in a series' is neither here nor there: yes, the Batman and Bond films are made by the same producers, but most popcorn-munchers won't know or care about that. The new Superman film uses the old theme tune for Supes despite not being in the same series, just like Bond continues to use his, but no one will be confused about whether he's the same Superman that Reeves played or not, and even if they are it won't really matter. He's just Superman.
Yeah, I think that's possible, that may well have been their thinking, it's hard to know. In Batman's case there was of course a whole other Batman who came in between TDKR and The Batman, so I don't think they felt they had to leave it that long, and audiences again were fine with it. And then a month after they wrapped The Batman, Keaton was back in the suit filming his version again! In the case of Spider Man I think it was more that they'd chosen to do his origin story again and folks were maybe a bit non-plussed that we were getting a whole new version so soon (and a version which was perhaps a bit less inspired than the last).
I finally watched The Fall Guy by the way, and you were right, it's a really fun film. It's a bit of a worry that it wasn't a hit and I'm not sure why, though I did think the trailer I saw was badly cut together, and the film's first ten minutes aren't good. It's a nasty reminder that good films sometimes don't find an audience. There are no sure things in the movie business, I don't envy Barbara Broccoli the decisions she has to make, especially in today's cinematic landscape.