Bezos owns James Bond, but he’s not licensed to kill him off

Every generation has its James Bond, and Amazon’s purchase of creative control over the movie franchise has triggered a moral panic about a new 007 corrupting the children. Female! Gay! A person of colour! Non-binary! God forbid, all of the above!

After five Bond movies, Daniel Craig, now 57, is succumbing to the rule that whatever else 007s can be, they can’t be a senior citizen. Pierce Brosnan, distinguished member of the Old Bonds’ Association, lent his airy weight to the argument by saying the next Bond must be British. It’s all as terrifying as a boys’ school going co-ed.

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

But a DEI hire to say “f--- you” to Donald Trump is about as likely as reversing time and whiting out Jeff Bezos from Trump’s inauguration – it’s not going to happen. Amazon has not bought an actor or a character but a piece of intellectual property from which it can spin off a Bondiverse of prequels, sequels, animations, games, standalone movies and immersive VR experiences. That’s what Amazon partially bought in 2022 and completed last month, taking full creative control from the children of the late Bond producer Cubby Broccoli. Purchasing IP is anti-risk.

The flap about casting overlooks past DEI Bonds. There have been a Scotsman (Sean Connery), an Irishman (Brosnan) and an Australian (George Lazenby). To encourage gender diversity, Bond has been played as a closeted queen (David Niven, Roger Moore). For affirmative action, Bond has given employment to actors who couldn’t act (Lazenby, Timothy Dalton). Brosnan said Amazon should treat “the character with dignity and imagination and respect”. Unless he was joking, it’s hard to imagine what he could possibly mean other than a prolongation of the current IP: risk nothing.

Old Bonds: Daniel Craig, Sean Connery and Roger Moore in their final outings as the super spy – all in their 50s.Credit: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures/MGM/UA Entertainment Co./AP

In 2006, Daniel Craig’s new 007 in Casino Royale, a safe remake, was a reversion to an imaginary past: Bond as a definitively cisgender Englishman. The Bond franchise was already spraying its pheromones, pushing back against “go woke, go broke”.

There were crumbs thrown to the progressive agenda. M became a woman (Judi Dench) before reverting to a man (Ralph Fiennes) famous for joining the mile-high club with a Qantas flight attendant. M’s assistant, Moneypenny, became black, but having a male PA would be too much. Secondary 007 characters have been a passing multicultural parade, dutifully inclusive but none as memorably diverse as Mike Myers’ Dutch, psoriasis-ridden Goldmember (“Shmoke and a pancake?”). Meanwhile, Bond himself remained what Esquire magazine in 2012 called a “boring, tasteless rapist”, anticipating by four years another death-defying bad actor to occupy world attention.

Brosnan’s preference that the next Bond be British asks more questions than it answers. What’s British? An Irishman? It’s hard to think of a bigger or more British action star than Idris Elba. Letitia Wright steals Black Panther. Or how about actors who can play Brits better than the Brits: our Hugh, our Cate, our (New Zealand’s) Rusty? Somehow that doesn’t seem what the Old Bonds’ Association means.

Unlike 007, Bond villains get updates. German, Chinese, Japanese and Soviet baddies mongered World War II and Cold War fears. Bond movies of the 1970s saved the world from Latin American drug lords, post-Communist Slavic madmen, Middle-Eastern terrorists and back to the Russians and even the OG villain, Blofeld, in Amazon’s first and Craig’s last film, No Time to Die. The evil media baron Elliot Carver (played by Jonathan Pryce) in Tomorrow Never Dies could have been an Australian newspaper owner. The lead villain’s mantle passed only once to a woman, Elektra King (played by Sophie Marceau) in The World Is Not Enough, but she was safely defined by men: avenging her father’s death with the help of another man (Robert Carlyle’s Renard Zokas). Women are sidekicks, not principal characters. Otherwise the Bondiverse wouldn’t be the Bondiverse.

Under Bezos, who is so far up Donald Trump that he can almost smell his mouthwash, the next Bond villain could be MAGA bait: an environmentalist Californian Democrat, a trans high jumper, a Ukrainian freedom fighter, a woke Anglican bishop, a Canadian – anything, really, from one day to the next.

But identity politics, as always, is a red herring. These casting mysteries divert attention from what is really happening to Bond.

Amazon entered the film and television business at a moment when IP became the shareholder’s sweet spot: the safe bet that is also the biggest winner. In 2022 Amazon paid $US250 million ($397 million) for the rights to the appendices of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, so that it could spin off new worlds for the pre-existing Rings audience. In paying $US8.5 billion for MGM Studios that year, Amazon was buying pre-existing audiences for everything from Bond to Rocky to Thelma and Louise, trying to hoover up every known storyline that hadn’t already been taken by Disney.

Peter Biskind, in his 2023 book Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television, describes IP-based film and TV as “another version of comfort viewing, warm and fuzzy, continuing familiar story arcs with the same characters”. Kevin Beggs, an executive at Lionsgate, told Biskind: “In a world of many platforms and 500 shows, an original breaking through is incredibly hard, so finding … some previously recognised fan base is hugely important.” It’s much easier, Beggs said, to convince management to outlay millions on more Star Wars and Game of Thrones where the audience can be kept safe from originality.

Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas in No Time to Die. At 57, it is time for Craig to accept his status as an erstwhile Bond. Credit: Nicola Dove © 2021 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM

Marvel, DC, blah blah blah and the rest of the known quantities have put cinema in shareholder capitalism’s wet dream: no alarms and no surprises. Amazon will take Bond the same way, judging by No Time to Die, which was, Biskind wrote, “a licence to kill the franchise”.

To be fair to Amazon, the licensing of Bond IP was already out of control on the page. Fleming wrote 20 Bond novels and stories that were adapted for the screen. Only three were made before his death in 1964. Since then, there have been at least 40 other Bond novels, Double O and Young Bond series, and hundreds of Bond comic strips and graphic novels. Licence to kill? Amazon will achieve its aims by boring us to death. Identity politics provide a useful distraction while power crushes the imagination and forces audiences into submission. In this way, maybe for the first time, the corporatised Bond universe accurately reflects the world it lives in.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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