After the last movie, revealing his daughter and his supposed death, the next movie could focus on the daughter. Growing up an orphan, just like James did.
One problem in dealing with large, young companies (especially tech) is that most of them have a sense of entitlement.
I.e. "Sure, you have/are ____, but we're ____. We're the real big deal."
I know Google was essentially laughed out of a Maps partnership inside a major warehouse retailer because Google refused to consider sharing the collected data with the retailer. "You wouldn't know what to do with it" was a direct quote.
It feels like legacy Hollywood, for all its faults, understood how to square ego circles better to get deals done.
> One problem in dealing with large, young companies (especially tech) is that most of them have a sense of entitlement. [...] It feels like legacy Hollywood, for all its faults, understood how to square ego circles better to get deals done.
I don't know much about this "tech culture", but are you sure that they really have this sense of entitlement? Couldn't it rather be that these "tech people" are simply less experienced in "deal politics" and bootlicking important stake holders?
If you come into a situation and decide not to “bootlick” as you say, you better be one of the best at what you do or you are going to have a very stuck if not short career.
When someone new comes and works for me or for anyone at my company they better be “bootlicking” higher ups and doing what they ask or they won’t last.
Indeed. You're not bootlicking or kowtowing, to simply meet as equal partners and determine what both sides need, want. The best deals, I find, are where "everyone wins".
This is entirely achievable, as both parties have different goals. What has value to one, may be meaningless to another. I've brokered deals where I gave nothing I cared about, yet that same point was of immense value to the other party.
Yet when you simply wave away the other's requests, that's madness. In the example given, what is the cost for Google sharing data from maps? Almost nothing. It has value, but the cost of cloning that data is absolutely minimal. The legal agreements and NDAs for that data are more expensive than any other aspect of the agreement.
And if that data has no value to the client, but they think they want it, even better! Now you're giving them something they don't really need, that you don't have a cost in giving, and it's now a bargaining chip with an innate value! Beautiful, absolutely beautiful!
I can even picture a scenario a month or two down the line. The client is baffled a bit by the API, what they receive. Now you consult for them, in an additional arrangement, and provide better integration, etc.
Instead of shutting them down (you wouldn't know what to do with it), you sell it to them as they wish, then teach them what to do with it! What an awesome business opportunity!
And of course during that arrangement, you may fine more revenue streams. And ones that, indeed, help the client even more!
Never shutdown a client like that.
Of course, the story could be exaggerated, or mistold.
If you think tech is entitled, you haven’t seen established players in longstanding industries. They aren’t entitled, they are the king and if you don’t play by their rules they just don’t do business with you.
> Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions
IMHO, this one line summarizes remarkably well why Hollywood wrecks fictional universes: Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Fantastic Beasts, DC Universe, and even parts of the Marvel universe.
I see the absence of an auteur capable of respecting themselves and therefore their audience as the root cause of clichéd moves such as "war is bad so let Wonder Woman kill the God Of War". Clearly, the person making such a decision simply does not have a reputation to uphold; what remains is optimizing ticket sales, one movie at a time.
It’s like you need a brand “steward” for these characters to protect the brand from stupid short term decisions but open minded enough to try new interesting things.
Let's not pretend that the James Bond franchise is some bastion of high art and creativity that must be protected from corporate interests. The films are as cookie cutter as they come. The same plots, ideas, stunts have been getting rehashed for 60 years now. Amazon can do no better or worse with it than any other studio.
Giving the character a break after the Daniel Craig era is a calculated business move, and a good one. They'll wait for public interest to drum up again in a couple of years and then magically resolve all their differences.
Agreed. I've seen every Bond movie (except the original Casino Royal. Does that even count?) and I couldn't tell you the plot of any of them. I can remember some moments from several but not the plot.
That's the one where the woman is painted gold? I remembered that it was about Fort Knox but I just read the summary on wikipedia and totally forgot that they were trying to destroy the gold not steal it.
I can see how Amazon’s data driven culture is completely incompatible with creative endeavours. Given their recent focus on short-termism I’m not convinced it’s that great for strategic thinking either.
They did play probably one of the most successful long games in the recent history of business. It does seem that now they’ve decided that it’s time to take profits, though.
Amazon has a real problem "playing nice" with any of the companies that signup on their platform. Even as a product seller, it is virtually guaranteed that if your product ever does really well on Amazon that Amazon will offer to buy you out and, if you refuse, develop a competitor who will then receive total priority on their platform.
I just discovered that Harry Saltzman [1] was part of the company with the film rights to James Bond. His life was incredibly adventurous, filled with fascinating experiences. He sold his shares in the 70s. His obituary [2].
The Bond franchise it a remarkable thing, but I don't know how you make it "fresh" without ruining the charm. The Craig years were a soft reboot -- Bond was a freshly promoted 00 in _Casino_, and was thus explicitly not the same guy who bested Dr Julius No.
I just don't know where they go from here that would be interesting, and I 100% do not trust Amazon to treat the property well AT ALL.
I'm not sure sad old Gen X folk like me, who were relatively starved for entertainment and found Bond via 2nd hand bookstores and repeats on tiny TVs are much of a market these days.
I think what they did with Top Gun was pretty good - it's still kinda about Maverick but set it up so the universe expands a bit. The po faced Craig films just got boring. I will re-watch the Moore films occasionally for the goofy nostalgia but I can't even remember the names of half the Craig movies.
Except, well, there ARE still interesting Trek stories being told on TV. That universe is interesting enough, and rich enough, that I see it as being more sustainable. I mean, not for nothing, but there's a whole HOST of characters there instead of one dude, as with Bond.
I'm a little confused about your ire about Dune. Prior to the recent films, those novels never had a decent adaptation -- Lynch's film in 1984, and then a really terrible TV attempt by SciFi like 25 years ago. They're hugely influential in SF, so taking another bite at the apple seems reasonable to me.
My understanding is that Villeneuve is in fact doing a film based on _Dune Messiah_ as a third film, but I don't know if he'll go farther than that. The books get increasingly goofy, so that would be a reasonable stopping point; nobody wants a 3 hour film about a giant human/worm hybrid who rules for 2,000 years or whatever.
The TV show is its own work. I have no judgement on it at all, but its success or failure doesn't affect my opinion of the films.
Why is everyone falling for the most obvious negotiation tactic in the world? The copyright owners know that Amazon has money, way more than any regular film studio. Watch their reservations about commercializing the franchise magically disappear once the number is high enough.
> Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.
That seems like the entire streaming ecosystem as services compete to pay more for content than it is worth and ultimately many lose money…. And the content is hidden / hard to find.
Have you given Season 2 a try? IMO it’s much improved and overall very entertaining, including to many Tolkien fans. I take it over the Hobbit films any day.
I feel like I should duck and cover after saying this, but after seeing what Amazon did to Lord of the Rings and what they are supposedly trying to do to Warhammer, I'm not surprised the creative owners are extremely reluctant to hand over the keys to Amazon.
Until Fleming started writing the books with the films in mind, Bond was already a very different Bond.
The books are uneven, IMHO, but "Casino Royale", the first of Fleming's novels — written well before the "Dr. No" film — is enjoyable and will give you a very different Bond from what you are used to. Insecure, self-doubting, no "gadgets".... "Diamonds Are Forever" was perhaps my favorite of the books though.
(The film "Goldfinger" actually improved upon the plot of the original book in my opinion — in the book Goldfinger actually tries to steal the gold from Fort Knox.)
My take after reading those is that the films are generally better works, but the other thing that's worth remembering is that Eon was out of the business of "adapting" Fleming novels after _Live and Let Die_. The follow-up (_The Man With The Golden Gun_) shares a title with a novel, but little else, and after that the films are mostly just a pastiche of whatever's-hot-in-Hollywood (e.g., _Moonraker_ having a space battle) and story elements pulled from lesser Fleming works and short stories.
The exception obviously is the _Casino Royale_ with Daniel Craig, which most fans view as one of the best Bond films. I've forgotten the specifics, but that book was unavailable to Eon for decades due to some copyright and licensing shenanigans.
> The exception obviously is the _Casino Royale_ with Daniel Craig, which most fans view as one of the best Bond films. I've forgotten the specifics, but that book was unavailable to Eon for decades due to some copyright and licensing shenanigans.
Daniel Craig's more bitter Bond is far closer to the Bond of the original books. Dark, morose, bitter, at times very disenchanted (several resignation letters, if not resignations), spends time alone with a bottle, womanizing in the "not sexy" way...
I don’t understand the hate for Amazon’s LotR compared to what they did to Wheel of Time! I’ll admit I’m not a huge LotR fan, but I didn’t hate the time I spent watching the Amazon adaptation. Wheel of Time though, they drove a truck through that poor franchise. Then backed up over it, and drove over it several more times!
I'd consider myself a WoT megafan. I've read the full series more than 10 times since AMoL, and did a re-read of the series before every book release when it was being written. I'm in the middle of a re-read right now, even - I just finished a chapter from A Crown of Swords right before opening HN and reading this article.
And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.
It's a 14.5 book series where the books average 600+ pages. Any adaptation is going to have to make massive changes, at least if they're filming it with real people. They also got dealt a raw hand with covid resulting in all sorts of set limitations and Mat's actor just... not returning after they filmed the first 6 episodes.
I reread the books after watching the show, and I have to say that I am in complete agreement with this take. I think there are 2 things that impact why people hate the adaptations.
1. Some people just don't like adaptations, and they need to understand what different mediums limit in terms of story telling. If you think of WoT as being 10,000 pages of content, and how you would shorten that to make it finish-able within a single human lifetime, then they have to change some things. But I gotta say, I think they capture a lot of the good of the books within the show.
2. Most people just have a picture in their head of what the thing is going to look like, and when that picture doesn't match up to what's made they're unhappy. And they don't understand why they couldn't just do the thing in their head because they don't understand the limitations of the medium.
2a. I think a thing that's important to a lot of people is the characters looking like the characters they imagine, and when casting is more diverse than that, people have a pretty negative reaction to the characters not "looking" like the characters. I think this ends up being more true the further from the description people feel like the characters are.
^This is a thing that has been hurting LoTR for a lot of people, in my opinion. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect.
I've also learned that some people just... didn't read the books all that closely, either. Or at least not character descriptions. Two Rivers people are described as being dark eyed and dark haired with fairly dark complexions - probably mediterranean - but people seemed to think they were supposed to look like they were from England, forgetting that Elaida explicitly mentions Rand is too fair skinned in EoTW. Or everyone outraged about Moraine/Siuan, apparently not understanding what RJ meant when he said they were "pillowfriends," despite lots of other fairly explicit hints at what the phrase meant.
It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.
In my opinion, If you are going to use an existing franchise with a built-in audience attached to it, you should feel obligated to honor the audience's vision for the franchise. If you have dramatically different visions then you should be creating original content.
The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
> It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there.
I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described."
I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean".
The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
> The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist.
Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.
>The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong.
I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes.
As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail.
The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.
My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
In Twilight, the main character is not actually described very well. There's an old comic from the oatmeal [1] about how the main character should be named "pants", because they're made just so that every reader can slip into the place and pretend like they're the main character.
This is a lot more common in books than I think you may realize. So when characters don't match expectations, it's because people are saying that characters don't look like them... which is, like, accidentally racism. To be clear, I don't think people are doing this maliciously. It's just that what you expect is not necessarily what you have to get.
>My point is that if you pick a diverse audience, you will come up with a diverse set of expectations.
You don't "pick" a diverse audience; you respect the audience/fandom how it currently is. I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
>which is, like, accidentally racism.
No it's not, it's people saying the character isn't as they expected them to be - and again that's on the person using the franchise to match what they are creating to that built-in audience FIRST and FOREMOST - if they don't want to respect that audience they shouldn't be touching the franchise they should be making something original.
> I refuse to believe that if you surveyed ANY fandom and asked them to do a character description of the main character, they wouldn't come to a fairly common consensus overall.
Even if the consensus is wrong? Jesus wasn't white, and wouldn't be described as white, but everyone in the US 'fandom' thinks Jesus looks like them. Also, Jesus is frequently portrayed differently in different parts of the world.
I really respect that, if anyone can speak to this it would be a devoted reader like you. I might even be willing to consider it in a new light after reading what you have to say.
I’m not an adaptation hater, I mourn the cancelation of the live action Cowboy Bebop, I loved it, despite that being an unpopular opinion. That being said…
There was a scene towards the end of season two, where the dark one was lobbing bad CGI fireballs at Egwene, and Moraine was down on the beach and launched a bad CGI dragon? to like even out the fight. And I could just feel the writers being completely lost there and just punting it over to the CGI department to figure it out…
Yeah - I would have liked Falme to be more epic, and Tarwin's Gap/Rand's fight with Aginor/Ishamael in Eye of the World. Impressive CGI is apparently quite expensive, though, especially at the scale necessary to really depict what is described in the books.
(Spoilers for a 3 decade old series to follow, I suppose!)
But at the same time, as written, these fights were... kinda weird. For Falme, Mat blows the horn, and a fog covers everything and no one can really see what's going on except localized fights, and Rand's fight with Ishamael happens in the fog with swords, yet... everyone can also see his fight happening in the sky, apparently for hundreds of miles around where it happened? It's written almost like some sort of dream sequence.
And the Eye of the World fight is even stranger. Minimal explanation as Rand fights to wrest control of the Eye away from Aginor, but then Aginor tries to use too much of the power from the Eye, and it kills him? Then he Travels to Tarwin's Gap and pounds his fist on the ground and blows up a Trolloc/Mydraal army... and then climbs through a bunch of non-euclidean stairways in another dimension to end up in Ishamael's bedroom where he somehow cuts the link from Ishamael to the Dark One, which causes Ishamael to fly into the fireplace and get burned up. And then Rand faints and somehow ends up back on the ground where he was originally fighting with Aginor.
The first time I read either fight scene I don't think I could have explained exactly wtf was going on, particularly the end of Eye of the World. Later books revealed some of the power and magic being used and clarified them a bit, but at the same time, Jordan also retconned how some things worked later in the series, which also made them more confusing in other ways.
Thankfully most later fights of this nature are less fever dream-ish and more practical. There's just a whole lot of challenges with the show that make it quite difficult to adapt. I think a long-running animation might have been a medium that would have allowed for more flexibility, but the lack of realism would also hurt. Maybe someday AI stuff will be amazing and we'll be able to just generate hundreds of hours of premium television.
Yeah. His storyline was supposed to track the original series much more closely, but filming got shut down for covid, and the actor didn't come back when it resumed. Deleted all his socials, etc. Didn't take any more work until just recently, too.
No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.
> No one knows what the deal was - lots of people speculated it was vaccine requirements when it was announced, but filming resumed before vaccines were available, so that couldn't have been it.
I have not read the books, so I guess I'm the target audience. It was very hard to watch. The actors were fine, actually better than fine, but the writing was painful. There are lots of standard adventure and fantasy arcs that are just impossible to carry forward with the type of "modern" they wanted. For instance, you cannot have the most diverse village in the history of villages anywhere, then later the Orc (?) stares at one of the kids once and goes "you are not from this village, you are certainly from this other village because of how you look". How? Aura color? At least change it so the kid has a tattoo or some birth mark then. I could go down a long list of dumb stuff like this that makes me come back to reality instead of allowing me to stay with the flow and enjoy the fantasy.
I reread the books multiple times. I was actually pretty impressed with how well they cast each character. Which is impressive because I think that's one of the hardest things to do.
But, the dialogue and storytelling were terrible. They invented new, pointless content. There's ~18k pages of source material. Amazon's job was to figure out how the hell to pair that down without compromising the original story. Instead, they went for visuals over storytelling
There’s actually an in book way to explain that, the clothing is always described as specific to the two rivers, and only Aiel have red hair. I agree The show was awful!
I don’t think that the ethnicity of the actors really matters all that much, the height & hair color are the only real trait that describes how Rand stands out. Honestly the only character with a skin color description I can recall is Tuon? And that isn’t really something that matters either…
Bigger issues as other people pointed out are things like inventing weird bullshit storylines when you have 10k pages of content to draw from, or messing with the “hard rules” of the magic system, such as you can’t burn out in a circle, or heal someone from death.
It ruined the suspension of disbelief immediately for me though. A rural village that doesn’t do constant international trade should have people living there that all look, speak, dress, and act similarly.
But the village looked like like an HR training video. To contrast, a new season of squid game just came out. Everyone is Korean. Everyone speaks Korean. Everyone looks Korean.
Right, the characters skin tones and real life ethnicities ruined the suspension of disbelief, because that’s harder to explain than Trollocs and the One Power??? Or Fades? Or the Dark One?
Or maybe you are hyper focused on specific, racial, details that you care about due to some internal biases?
> And... I think the WoT adaption is fine. It's not exactly how I would have done it, and there are a few choices that I think are just bad, but on the whole I have enjoyed the show and think it captures most of the primary elements of the series.
It's (and I say this as someone who sees themselves quite progressive) a bit too feminist.
It seems determined to make Nynaeve and Egwene the heroes of the show, the badasses on which everyone, including Rand, rely on. Not content with them already having access to the Power, and being among the strongest among the Aes Sedai, Amazon made them even more powerful and heroic than the books.
In contrast, in the books, Nynaeve and Egwene (it may be Elayne - in either case, two of these three) were actually rather "put out" by the fact that Rand was who he was and his access to the Power. Paraphrasing from the book:
"They were shocked, and not a little annoyed and upset. The Tower had told them that they were the strongest they'd seen with the Power in centuries, perhaps the strongest ever, and along comes Rand, barely able to control it himself, and yet even with them both fighting with all their might, he controlled both of them so... effortlessly... and then to say he wasn't even using a fraction of the Power he'd drawn before!"
I do give kudos to Amazon for respecting the diversity of the books, though.
I haven't watched the Rings of Power though I have seen enough YouTube analyses of it to know I don't want to. I think the issue with it is that they spent $1bn on it, so you'd think they'd make sure the story and action scenes were top notch, not middling cliche.
I get it, I just finished Arcane and that was pure chef’s kiss. It can be done and it’s so disappointing when it’s not, especially considering the budget. Although maybe with that much money involved it’s probably hard to keep one unified vision as I’m sure there are many interests competing.
That being said, it was still better than Wheel of Time. I’d argue that LotR was watchable, where as WoT was absolutely not!
I'd forgotten about WoT. I was going to mention what they did to The Expanse when they took over the show but as a straight steaming pile of shit WoT takes it. I couldn't even finish the third episode.
I liked most of the first season of WoT; though it got more and more divergent (and felt worse for it) as the season went on. The final episode lost me. I've been meaning to watch the second season but haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. (I say this as one who happily completed multiple rereads of the original series as new books came out)
There's no world where anyone adapts the book series closely with live action. The series is simply too long, particularly for the level of CGI, etc., we expect out of this sort of "premiere" television. I think overall they've done a good job given how difficult the task is, though there's certainly some changes that I think were mistakes, and other things that while I might not outright believe are mistakes, are different from how I would have done it.
I will say I agree that the last episode of S1 is my least favorite, but, they had a lot stacked against them and had to rewrite the final two due to Mat's actor not coming back after covid forced a filming break. That set off a chain reaction with a lot of far reaching consequences.
I liked S2 more than S1. Quality went up on basically every metric for me, though the finale still wasn't as epic as I would have hoped for... but is probably about all you can hope for without a LOTR-like budget. If they somehow make it to Dumai's Wells, hopefully they have more money then.
Agreed, it started out alright but got worse and worse as it diverged from the books. The finale of S2 is truly laughable. If you switch your expectations to fantasy/comedy you mighhhhht be able to enjoy it?
I might be in the minority here, but I couldn't stand the Wheel of Time book; given its popularity I gave it about 200 pages before discarding it as poorly-written, under-edited, over-wrought, unoriginal, derivative drivel. Different strokes, I guess.
>after seeing what Amazon did to Lord of the Rings
I don't understand how streaming services with huge budgets are so constantly bad when it comes to writing. I found the Amazon Lord of the Rings series just empty and I quit on it, something I couldn't imagine doing. The dialogue was simply dreadful to listen to.
How is it they so regularly skimp on the creative side of things and while they might have nice effects the content still seems so woefully unpolished/amateurish in other ways?
Because good creativity is somewhat orthogonal to money after a certain level. Peter Jackson didn’t make the greatest films of my childhood because he thought it would make him a lot of money. It was the inverse: he had to convince other people they would make money in order to access the resources required to make the greatest films of my childhood.
My take is that design by comity destroys art. Art requires personality and a departure from median is a prerequisite for good art. As such, it scales poorly.
Initially, they're correlated and pointed in the same direction - do better work, get better pay.
At some point, they become orthogonal - they're just collecting a paycheck, the content has to exist but its content doesn't matter.
I do feel that there's a point beyond that at which they're inversely correlated: To navigate the power structures and economics at the top, you have to prioritize money and politics above art.
It's the same reason politics are broken: Local township boards can be just people who want to help their neighbors, at the middle levels in state and city posts you have to be good at fundraising and advertising but it's not all-consuming, but to win big races you have to be ruthless, because if you aren't, someone more ruthless than you will win.
Dialogue is getting worse and worse in almost all newer films and series.
Netflix boss tells writers to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”
“Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told [the author] a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)”
Sounds like all new productions reading this. We really live in idiocracy.
It certainly feels like I'm watching shows with scenes where nothing happens but everyone just "says" their motivation over and over inexplicably not saying / doing anything else ...
The Godzilla series Monarch (another show I quit on) was like that with the younger characters constantly just saying their motivation (and still inexplicably not keeping it straight, it changed randomly). But they never DO anything about it, they just use up all the time saying it. It made them seem very wishy washy / spineless dispite supposedly being adults.
Come to think of it the Lord of the Rings series has a lot time wasting repetition too...
> I don't understand how streaming services with huge budgets are so constantly bad when it comes to writing
Because when there's a lot of money involved, writing is generally done by committee. We only see the writer(s) who get the writing credit but not the process. Studio execs, producers, etc will impose their opinions/ideas on the script.
Smaller projects can afford to take risks but with huge projects there's a lot more pressure to not fail.
Ironically, this usually results in a worse product...
They’re trying to create content solely to get people to sign up for and maintain an Amazon subscription, which means they have to fire as many arrows as possible into as many genres as possible. As with any DND weapon or spell, a spreadshot modifier reduces accuracy, impact, and/or to-hit percentage. So instead of producing content that they think deserves the light of day, they produce content to fill gaps in their spreadshot. That will automatically be less inspired, no matter how much they spend — and the more they spend, the less taxes they have to pay on their revenue. Thus a hundred million dollar adaptation that hits all the buttons with the same drab arrow that their spreadshot fires at every genre.
This leads to their unwillingness to risk alienating anyone by making good creative decisions. Endless cycles of focus groups and executive committee notes will ensure that the finished produce has maximized appeal at the cost of being polished and professional, because all of those reworks leave little time to get it right, and anything good has to be done in secret without execs realizing it and fucking it up. Disney, their elder, is quite familiar with this problem:
If you watch, for example, The Substance (2024) or Amélie (2001) or Hackers (1995), and then watch any modern generic Amazon/Netflix streaming movie, you can usually see the difference immediately. One is laser-focused on being the work of art it chooses to be, with no regard whatsoever for whether it attracts or repels any single person, and in fact will make decisions that drive away some percentage of viewers for some reason other than genre mismatch. The other is more often like a child trying to play all the keys on the piano at once, in order to make the loudest noise possible in a room full of other children doing the same. (For contrast, consider Hulu’s exclusive movies; they somehow made a best-in-category time loop movie?!)
If your product isn’t driving some people away for being a poor fit for their needs, then your product is probably too generic. In a field where nearly everything is generic, that may seem like it’s fine; but it’ll cost you customer stickiness to get away with it, as they’ll walk away from you the instant something less generic is a viable option.
Being good in selling stuff and running servers doesn't mean you are automatically great at producing movies and television series, even if you have a lot of money.
What are they supposedly trying to do with Warhammer (40k)? I am aware that Amazon has the rights and are working on developing something, but apart from the Secret Level episode (which was good), has there been any details?
While some of what Amazon has made is terrible, much is good. They produce so much that the average quality is pretty close to the global average, so I find predictions challenging.
The rage bait on the internet claims they are changing the lore to accommodate DEI. Don't shoot the messenger plz. I'm just saying I understand why the creative content owners are concerned about Amazon retconning lore and maybe want to see how things like Warhammer play out first.
It might be a moot point anyway. If we can consider Disney a bellwether¹, expect more content producers to step back on the diversity front.
Personally I think it completely depends on the story and artistic direction. Wolf Hall (casting mostly reflects historical appearances of characters portrayed) can exist next to Bridgerton (explicitly colour-blind casting). Both have their merits.
I think most rage bait about the Warhammer series is manufactured by content farm channels to generate clicks - the series wasn’t even officially in development until a few weeks ago.
There’s an entire subgenre of YouTube channels that consist solely of creators updating videos promising that they have inside information on the creative conflicts at Lucasfilm/Amazon/etc, all of which happen to align perfectly with whatever the fandom is outraged with that week.
This guys channel is a great example - most of the channels discussing “female custodes Henry cavil warhammer 40k tv series” Amazon follow a similar format.
Edit:
I’d also add that I don’t think Rings of Power is bad because they cast minorities - most of the actors are fine, really. The plotting and pacing is just horrendous. In a show that has 5+ active plot lines and threads scattered all over the world, they’ve spent a quarter of their screen time on a plot line that’s completely disconnected not just from the lore but from the wider story being told and doesn’t look like it’s going to connect anytime soon. Which is funny, because I’d imagine Amazon execs felt that they were obligated to include that plot line (the Hobbit one) to appease viewers.
Amazon has a diversity team in the entertainment side of business that literally changes casting and content to fit their DEI goals. It often happens in awkward and forced ways, and that is affecting things like this Bond controversy. Most of this is motivated simply by Amazon’s own DEI culture. But part of it is because the award shows have criteria for eligibility (for best picture etc) that require meeting diversity and other requirements that have nothing to do with how entertaining the show is. Since those creating or participating in these shows don’t want to be ineligible, they do whatever it takes, including retconning.
I worked for AWS for 3.5 years. Their only culture is to treat all employees like shit, a PIP culture and one that they know they can continue being tech’s worst employer (despite the newest Leadership Principle) because all of the H1B visa holders will do damn near anything to keep their jobs.
This isn’t an H1B Visa holder rant. It’s an indictment to the program that keeps them beholden to a company.
As an internal employee I never saw anything but a perfunctory “ally” programs and a bunch of talk about “diversity” and of course we had to watch the videos and use language that didn’t offend anyone.
FWIW: I’m Black and I found some of the things that were suppose to trigger me or some of the “green washing” that were suppose to give me a warm and fuzzy eye rolling.
To be clear, I had a customer facing role (AWS Professional Services). Amazon wasn’t about to send anyone incompetent to talk to their large clients I don’t care what kind of initiatives they had.
> But part of it is because the award shows have criteria for eligibility (for best picture etc) that require meeting diversity and other requirements that have nothing to do with how entertaining the show is. Since those creating or participating in these shows don’t want to be ineligible, they do whatever it takes, including retconning.
Perhaps I'm a little bit too rebellious to be a culture fit for the movie industry, but if this is the case, I would be very encouraged to create an a show that is outstanding, but violates the DEI criteria of the award, so that the awards become a target of ridiculation for not including "my" show because of stupid DEI criteria.
I wonder if these are the same people who whined about DC casting a black woman to play an orange alien from Tamaran?
They also criticized Disney for having a Black Captain America in the movies even though it was clear to any Marvel comics fans that this was always going to be the case.
When you get people showing up to events in neo Nazi iconography, being allowed to stay and play, and then the IP owner has to clarify (again) that they don't actually support hate groups? [0]
Or the community makes memes about a certain type of fan? [1]
That feels like a lot.
And I get it -- lots of people are too dumb for satire.
But when GW plays with fire they have a social safety responsibility to be extra cautious, not laissez faire 'Who could have ever forseen that burning trash in my house might lead to the entire building catching fire?'
It's a very unfortunate thing that the 40k community has mythologized this large contingent of Nazis that is allegedly omnipresent yet never even a creepshot of them surfaces at events. I feel like many more people would love to join the community (which is great) but are scared off by this self-slander the community puts on itself.
Every fandom - Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Doctor Who, D&D, gaming, anime, all of them - have garnered a vocal contingent of incels raging about "DEI" and "woke" and trying as hard as possible to shit in the pool and ruin the fun for everyone else. It's the legacy of GamerGate.
Probably a hot take but if you use the word 'incel' to label people you are kinda trash. If you use sexuality to label people in a bad way/try to demean them (especially when one of the worlds you use is involuntary I.E. out of their control), you are definitely trash.
Incelism has nothing to do with sexuality. Incel culture labels people - especially women - in bad ways and demeans them all the time. It's misogyny as an identity, it is not an immutable personal characteristic. Their participation in that culture and their behavior is entirely within their control.
There have not been any details. There have been YouTubers making things up and desperately pretending Henry Cavill is their champion standing bravely against "woke".
And seeing where they’re at with the plot line killing off Bond, it’s definitely an inflection point to see how they reinvent the series. Until now, Bond never actually died, but Amazon might just find a way…
Craig was arguably more like the Bond in the books - a government assassin. I grew up watching the bond movies with my Dad (who'd read the books), and to me Sean Connery was the real bond, since he came first, but Roger Moore playing it for laughs was entertaining too. I never cared for any of the others.
I thought Roger Moore played the sociopathic side of Bond quite well; the same level of bon mot whether he's playing cards or just sliced someone's head off.
Such quaint times. Nowadays every media release has some people having extremely intense feelings of hatred towards it, amplified several fold by the Algorithm.
I got a friend who is a proper 40k guy (paints, mini-dolls, the lot)(I call them mini-dolls instead of figures or figurines to piss him off, and it works!!!).
He was initially excited to see "Superman" being involved, but now he also fears that this would turn to a shitshow.
Worse case it tanks, Amazon has yet another TV failure, and the fans continue to enjoy their mini-dolls and pretend-battles.
There is an expectation in the community that Games Workshop will only be concerned with the money and ownership of the property (for the money). They don't play well with others. They seem unconcerned about their customers in general.
It's an abusive and expensive relationship. It's like an old school company that has no clue about inventory management, but they're in the 21st century now. They can have a million preorders for things which are mass produced from molds, and they can't manage to deliver them. Or books. Instead, any limited run ends up in the hands of scalpers.
Now they move into the entertainment industry. What are we to expect there? It's a notoriously difficult industry to operate in. They have to deal with Amazon and whoever is producing, but can they leave their hands off something long enough to let it get made? I have serious doubts.
They will meddle. I assume Amazon is negotiating to guarantee some level of control.
I think the best hope for any good content will continue to be fan create videos.
Right, it's so simple to make a good Bond film once you accept that you need to give the people what they want, people here being actual Bond fans (not "society") and what they want being classic male escapist fantasy.
This push to "modernize" Bond is regressive once you realize male desire has not changed and thus there is nothing to modernize. Depictions of a cool spy dude getting beautiful women to fall for him is not "sexist" and not in need of modernization.
More generally the "modernization" angle is all about making the films which appeal to both men and women, which is a losing proposition for Bond which is fundamentally a franchise for men. You are always going to create a more compelling piece of content by tailoring it to a specific group, and the vast gulf in the sorts of content men and women tend to enjoy (generalization of course with many exceptions, but generally true nonetheless) means any bridge spanning that gap will be flimsy and weak.
Mission Impossible scratches most of my Bond itch, and it doesn’t really have a lot of the womanizing stuff. What I want from Bond is for someone to steal a space shuttle.
While I agree on the itch scratching. I also don’t necessarily feel like the type of womanizing I see in bond is a display of toxic masculinity. So, just because MI can be enjoyed without it doesn’t mean it needs to be culled in our modern world. I’m not a super fan but my impression/memory is most of the women that are being womanized are also extremely capable, strong, powerful, even deadly women and they’re usually always flirtatiously consenting in their exchanges. While I don’t need it, it does give me a different understanding of bond as a person/character than I know of the MI guy whose character’s name or personality outside of the mission I can’t even recall from memory.
Bond is a holistic character. He’s whole life is a male fantasy. He’s suave , has an awesome job, cars, adventure, fights, etc. MI is just doubling down on the action and adventure part highlighting the physical capabilities of the main character. You don’t really care about his personality (perfect role for Tom Cruise imo)
In any case, I feel like it’s become normal to characterize all masculinity as toxic and statements like yours is kind of like the “people who say only bad guys worry about privacy” to put a HN tech spin on it. You allowing and excusing it in a way and I feel like it’s a slippery slope
You can have sexy women in your movies without being sexist. No one, aside from some crazy weirdoes, is telling men not to be horny. A lot of the bond girls are really boring characters that just exist to get fucked. Pierce Brosnan's character in The Thomas Crowne Affair is not that far off from his Bond persona but his love interest is an actual character and that movie is so much hotter.
Yesterday on NPR they said that during last 2 decades number of movies with sex decreased 40% and mentioned Marvel as a showcase. I guess that is modern escapism - very neutered, no sex and a lot of pointless and senseless, in all senses, [imitation of] violence. And judging by how much money it gets - that is what audiences want.
Yes please? If only TV and movies would show the full range of human sexuality and not just cater exclusively to the vanilla fetish crowd. To quote the immortal words of the Joffrey gif from Game of Thrones, “talk shit get hit” can be comedic, dramatic and, in a well-crafted context, sexy content in a movie. Romance novels and fanfic have been well aware of this for an eternity, and certainly pull no punches when it comes to people slapping.
The issues with Bond are that he’s uniformly portrayed by white men who are only portrayed sleeping and slapping women. Give us a Bond who sleeps and slaps men with the same abandon that he does women, and interest in Bond movies will go through the roof. And:
An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.
> An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.
There was a scene in The Americans where the husband and wife Soviet agents talked about / reminisced about their training. And that to the Soviets, sexuality was just another tool in the box. If you're seducing for the job, what does it matter? The husband was taught about seducing men, and the wife women, as much as the opposite sex (this is not an attempt to simplify / reduce sexuality, just how it is portrayed in the show).
The load-bearing word “is” here overlooks a rather striking imbalance (pun intended). I’m picturing two supercuts and the one where Bond hits men and is hours long, versus the one where Bond hits women and is ten or fifteen minutes long at best. So, yeah, “is” — but was there some argument you intended to make that your statement supports?
> Mads Mikkelsen says 'Casino Royale' director told him and Daniel Craig to stop improvising during a nude torture scene
It turns out that the actors tried to advance the needle here, and make it into a psych torture and have it be more than just a basic rudimentary beating! But no, “it’s a Bond movie”, sigh, and so what could have been a deeply uncomfortable and memorable scene was neither.
I've lived with a Bond fanatic before, and still have on my shelf a complete collection of every Bond movie. So, did I rewatch fragments of a bunch of Bond movies through a slapcut alone? No, thank you, that's a complete waste of my time. I'm already rather familiar with the source material, and I'm pretty sure I've seen that supercut before. Still, though. Can you imagine how much more entertaining Roger Moore's Bond would have been if he used a martial art centered around slaps, and did so completely in character with no acknowledgement that it's wildly funny to Bond lovers? I would love to see that, no matter what the characteristics of the lead.
Bond slapping people is about power and control fantasies. Bond was created at a time when women were finally wielding power of their own again in modern culture, and showed what was appealing to the men whose desires preceded the rise of women having power independent of men. Decades have passed since that moment in time, but Bond has remained fixed in stone, with only the barest concessions to reality, using women just as he always has - that is, needlessly different from how he uses men, without any cause other than stereotypes inherited from the 1950s.
The power fantasy of Bond is that Bond is a high-functioning sociopath, who has no problem using people for whatever meets their needs and then discarding them utterly. That power fantasy used to be the exclusive privilege of straight white men. That is no longer the case. Seeing all Bonds be straight white guys who only slap women is boring. That power fantasy is played out and dull and on its way out. I don't care if some Bonds are straight white dudebros, but it sure would be a lot more in character if they slapped everyone – and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them slept with non-women on screen — and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them weren't white.
Asking an intelligence agency to stop sending people to hit people for information is nonsensical. Only showing people reacting by providing the information is also nonsensical. There are quite enough people out there that would bust out laughing at that attempt, not to mention a few that would outright try to bite his hand off the next time he swung at them. I do respect that the mores of the time were afraid to show Bond actually punching a woman, but with all due respect, that was, rounding up, about a hundred years ago. Intelligence agencies have moved ahead with the times. Yes, I pointedly mean that Bond should be doing just as worse to the women as to the men, when it comes to getting information — whether that's slaps, punches, CBT, or buying them champagne and getting their shirt off.
There's a lot of us waiting in the wings to see the exact Bond power fantasy portrayed in that slapcut, by people that we can imagine ourselves being. Generic white guy #12 is not going to qualify, no matter how cool he is. (And let's face it: Foghorn Leghorn is a much better detective than Bond anyways.) Focusing on slapping is a distraction from the real problem: Bond was created, and has been maintained since, as a sociopathic power fantasy for straight white men alone. Until that broadens to represent that exact fantasy for others, I see little hope for the future of the franchise.
Don't change Bond-the-sociopath. Just remove the artificial restrictions on Bond's skin color and gender, and who he slaps, hits, flirts, and sleeps with.
I don't have a problem with people being flawed even if they seem like the hero in other ways. Happy to see her slap him back too ...
I worry sometimes we're headed for a situation where media and stories are almost whitewashed. There are some fandoms I'm into where fans go through past books and raise issues where "isn't this character being a bully here" and the answer is kind of... but they're also a kid at that point and kids do say mean things ... that's reality.
The problem with all this “modernisation” (what a euphemism) stuff going on in entertainment is that you’re trying to transform and change existing characters and franchises.
It’s just a money grab to capitalise on existing characters with existing fan bases.
Inevitably it’s ruined. Bond fans aren’t watching Bond movies thinking “this is sexist”. LoTR fans aren’t reading a fantasy series with influences from Christianity and a white guys experience in WWI thinking “we need more representation of people of colour and genders”.
The solution to this is also trivial: Forget all the old stuff. Write new characters and stories. Or build fans for modern works.
We’re already seen this done: Avatar (not the blue alien one), Dragon Prince, Wheel of Time.
Roger Moore is my favorite James Bond. And so is my 15-year-old son's. Yes, his behavior is old school and wouldn't be tolerated in modern times. So what, he doesn't appear in a movie set in modern times.
This "modernization" of characters is failing in most franchises because it alienates the old viewers without doing much for new ones. It creates Frankensteins that please nobody, typical "by committee" designs.
Instead of changing Bond, Amazon should be trying to create a new Bond that will capture the current generation's imagination like the old Bond did decades ago.
OP is saying that the old Bonds (Connery, Lazenby, Moore) were suited to male tastes that haven't changed since, thus the attempt to modernize Bond is misguided at best.
What I'm saying is that my (male) tastes have modernized, that the male tastes that made old Bonds popular are tastes I find gross and unrealistic today, and I don't feel like I'm alone.
I think the specifics are less important than the general tastes in this case, men still want to be highly trusted international "spies" gallivanting across the world fighting evil with women lusting after them every stop of the way, it's just that the details as to what that looks like have changed.
I think the Craig movies are the high point so far of the series for a variety of reasons. They still have the swaggering machismo of Bond, but with more varied and interesting consequences. Bond still gets laid, but it's not treated as a mid-mission diversion (or post-mission reward) to which Bond is entitled. Craig proved there's lots of modernizing that can be done without touching the core conceit of being a 00 agent.
I agree! Whatever else they are from a critique standpoint, I absolutely love how they’ve modernized the Bond-the-slutty-sociopath role into something that’s actually plausibly what I would expect to find in today’s reality. They did beautiful work with that aspect of modernization and the Craig movies are most memorable of all of them to me now (though I will always hold a fondness in my heart for LASER BEAMS IN SPACE).
They did not do so well with modernizing any of Bond’s skin color, gender, or bedroom scene co-stars; nor did they portray him assaulting women for information like he would men.
I seem to remember on one of the special features on the DVDs that they needed to change to a lighter more comic style with Moore because of the reaction to the Vietnam War.
Dude hate to hit you up with it but whole Bond is about being unrealistic just like Santa Claus.
Being masculine in unrealistic way is part of the fun. Just the same as cars with machine guns in the hood or wrist watch with laser cutting through things.
It is like nagging that in Star Wars explosions in space have sound and are not like actual explosions that would happen in space…
There's degrees of "unrealistic" though, and it's tied to how relatable the Bond is. The old Bonds were a mixture of action hero spy guy and Playboy-style gentleman. Over time, the Playboy lifestyle has aged poorly and finally been peeled away from Bond.
Now, you can argue that formula for Bond was unique, and what differentiates him from Bourne or Reacher, and worth keeping for that reason. But against that, you have the fact that I and a lot of other viewers find the Playboy lifestyle to be a really silly and distasteful fantasy that seems uniquely laughable now, and far harder to suspend disbelief for than generic action hero stunts.
Being killer machine is not distasteful? Like killing people with a pencil is cool yeah right…
Being able to pick up hot women is totally not cool?
My theory is fantasy about killing people is OK because it doesn’t happen - no one is really facing situations where they would have to be in „for life or death” fight.
Being around opposite sex or having actual sex happens and it is tough on people who feel less attractive or feeling inadequate - and feeling inadequate happens awfully often and people don’t want hot movie star to remind the about their shortcomings.
While I think this misses the above poster's point (Bond has always been a masculine-in-a-heterosexual-way fantasy, and going against that would alienate a majority of his core audience) it would be interesting to have a Jack Harkness type of Bond.
The post doesn’t definitively answer whether Bond is bisexual but argues for the importance of acknowledging the possibility. It highlights how the franchise’s ambiguity opens the door for diverse interpretations, inviting viewers to see Bond through their own lenses and experiences.
I mostly enjoyed Rings of Power, particularly Season 2, despite its differences from the source material and the atrocious direction and editing in some episodes
>The two sides are at an impasse: Amazon needs Broccoli to furnish them with ideas for a new Bond movie, but Broccoli doesn’t want to make a new Bond movie with Amazon.
No offense to the Broccoli family or the franchise but these movies aren't exactly full of original new ideas. They've been rehashing the same formula since the 60s. It doesn't take a creative genius to come up with these plots and I'm pretty sure ChatGPT could generate new ones just as effectively
It's Bond. A certain resemblance is necessary. It doesn't suffice to add a few Martinis here, a PPK there, and end with a showdown against a super villain involving tech gadgets. The movie also needs sexism and humor, at least.
Seriously, reinventing Bond while modernizing it but keeping it a Bond movie is challenging. A challenge that people should accept.
Ah, the good old days of "Take up the white man's burden." Bond belongs to the era of Kipling, when the sun never set on the British Empire and the broad-backed soldiers of the Queen ruled the world.
(Hm. A Bond movie set in 1890... That might work. Read Kipling's "Miss Youghal's Sais" for ideas.[1])
Bond was born outdated when the british empire was gone. Now it's really time to invent something else instead of keep doing the same stuff over and over. No matter how much the visitors of this website might downvote me :D
> Now it's really time to invent something else instead of keep doing the same stuff over and over. No matter how much the visitors of this website might downvote me :D
Be fine with the fact that you are not the target audience of the James Bond movies.
This was my thought reading through the article. It makes it sound like the Broccoli family is this enlightened steward of this great and hallowed tradition. But its James Bond. It has been rarely more than shallow entertainment, and at its worst is dated, sexist, and tasteless.
Also, while I understand everyone piling on Amazon for producing bad or mediocre shows (Rings of Power), they do have a number of pretty solid shows as well (Fleabag, Fallout, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, partially The Expanse, etc.). It is not as if other streaming networks are only producing solid hits.
The Daniel Craig Bond movies were a pretty significant reinvention, much welcomed and generally pretty good, with the highs much higher than the lows were low. I don't think it's fair or accurate at all to say that Casino Royale, Skyfall, or even No Time To Die were of a piece with the 60s movies in tone or style.
I wouldn't be suprised if this attitude is indeed prevalent at Amazon and across studio executives as a whole. But the lack of respect for the process of crafting a good story seems to me to be why all these studios keep churning out rubbish that is eating away their bottom lines and destroying the very expensive franchises they keep buying then end up winding down.
Moreover, there are almost zero examples of Eon films where the Eon ideas were good.
The films are pretty straight-ahead adaptations of Fleming novels through _Live and Let Die_. After that, they were out of books they had rights to, and the films take a serious plunge in terms of actual quality. For my money, the only genuinely watchable non-adaptation example after LALD is _Goldeneye_.
I mean, note the huge jump in quality when Craig came on when they finally DID have a Fleming novel they could work from again, right?
No love for _The Spy Who Loved Me_? Maybe Dalton isn't your favorite Bond, but his entries are at least par for the course rather than a serious plunge.
I'd agree that the last 25 years has given us a lot of duds and _Casino Royale_ is the main exception. However, I think it's more likely that Purvis and Wade are the issue here, as the 1977-1997 era showed that Eon could make a decent original Bond.
Not really, no. It was pretty weak sauce aside from the skiing intro.
I found both Dalton outings pretty silly, though one of us gave us an early appearance by Benicio Del Toro. Dalton deserved better, as did Brosnan modulo _Goldeneye_, which is for me a top-5 entry.
I disagree on your conclusion re: "decent original Bond" between '77 and '97, but I'd argue that the success of _Skyfall_ and _No Time To Die_ does show they got around to it.
I found Casino Royal to be a huge disappointment. As far as I'm concerned, the whole concept of "spy action thriller" is inherently ridiculous, so you might as well go all in on the wacky cartoon hijinks and have some fun with it. The franchise peaked with Die Another Day.
Well it's something she is at least invested in and cares about as a narrative and product, whereas Amazon solely wants to turn it into money.
I don't think we're looking for heroes, necessarily, but if you care about a franchise, you want someone who cares about it deeply enough to preserve its ethos.
I have a cousin who cares deeply about the family farm he inherited. He's obviously trash because he care about something he inherited not created, right? Hating people is ugly. Hating people because of their characteristics from birth is ugly.
Can you explain what you’re talking about some more? Other than mentioning that Brocolli is fine with a gay non-white male (but has to be a male), where in article did you glean anything about DEI?
I honestly think the anti-DEI crowd is nearly as unbearable as the brief reign of SJW in 2018. DEI is becoming a perennial bogeyman for some people…
While I prefer a Bond movie, after seeing how Amazon handled Jack Reacher, they might be able to do some sort of mini-series.
As long as James Bond is a white, British male. You can't change the character after all this time, just for the sake of changing it. If they want to make someone else "007," fine, since someone will get the license Bond retires or gets killed.
If you read the article you would’ve seen that Brocolli is fine with a non-white and/or gay person playing Bond; they have to be British and male though.
I think that’s the a good tact to take. Let’s not pretend that Bond as a character hasn’t changed over the decades.
A good approach is how Machine Games approached Indiana Jones. The older movies, especially Temple, have some really uncomfortable scenes with women and Asian people. So they opted instead to portray Indy as we remember him, which is a gruff everyman who respects cultures and people and hates facists.
I understand Brocolli is fine with it. (I didn't say he wasn't.) I just don't see changing Bond's sex or race. Bond is an established character. if you want, say, an Asian female secret agent, come up with a new character.
Maybe you skimmed too quickly. Brocolli is a woman - that’s made abundantly clear throughout the article - and she also is adamant about maintaining the gender of the character. It appears that race (and sexual orientation) is not a key component of Bond for the family, and I agree with them. Why would it?
I think a gay black British man would do very well. The original Bond, both in the books and the older movies, despite the misogyny apparent of the time, also broke a lot of stereotypes for sex and licentiousness. Pushing those boundaries has been key to Bond for a long time. Why not a gay black man then, to hold to the same spirit.
> The older movies, especially Temple, have some really uncomfortable scenes with women and Asian people.
Good lord, yes. Temple of Doom received criticism for its racist depiction of India even when it came out in 1984; it's downright uncomfortable to watch today.
What if they changed the character, not for the sake of changing it, but to bring out something new and interesting and creative that produced an overall better viewing experience?
Yup, for example: I'd love to see what a good writing of a Bond played by Idris Elba would look like. The only requirement is good writing which seems to not be incentivised much in this world of lame data-driven corporations dictating taste.
But I’m not sure how they will pull it off at all.
The original Bond was stereotypical of how women were treated, for Queen and Country. The Daniel Craig reboot made Bond have a soul and conscience, and more depth in character. This was also aided by more time having passed and the world’s theater changed accordingly.
Where can go that won’t be a repeat of what Daniel Craig did? Go in the past or future?
Going to the future could be interesting, exploring a bit more of sci-fi, a more Star Trek-y society where social justice isn't as large of an issue, new technologies of terror from a Bond villain marrying with Black Mirror-esque future.
I could see this working broadly without triggering the neo-cons sensibilities about whatever they call "wokeness" but being able to explore cultural acceptance, horrors of new technology, etc.
Er, no, Sean Connery was born and raised in Scotland. He literally had a tattoo that reads "Scotland Forever". Entirely different culture and history and relationship with the British military/imperial apparatus than Bond represents.
