Who knows what Bond 26 has in store. This week, a British tabloid got a lot of publicity for saying a certain actor has the inside track for the role.
Here's a wish for Bond 26: After more than a decade of deconstructing James Bond during the Daniel Craig era, can we start building him back up?
Throughout Craig's tenure, we'd hear how everything is all set for Bond to be Bond again. We can now have Bond do anything! Yet, with every Craig movie, the deconstruction continued.
Finally, with No Time to Die, Bond had a wife, a kid, and got killed at the end. That's the ultimate deconstruction.
Barbara Broccoli, the boss of Eon Productions, has said repeatedly that Bond needs a new direction. We can't rush things, etc.
Hot take: It doesn't really matter who gets cast as Bond in future films (assuming they get made). The question is what do you do with Bond?
In the real world, movie audiences haven't warmed to sequels of late. Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, released in 2023, did OK at the box office but wasn't a runaway hit. Some sequels such as The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny only did so-so.
The Bond franchise has done sequels for more than 60 years since the release of Dr. No (1962).
The last actual Ian Fleming novel adaptation was Casino Royale (2006). That was 18 years ago. There are slivers of Fleming's stories that haven't been adapted into movies (such as a brainwashed Bond trying to kill M in the 1964 novel The Man With the Golden Gun).
For now, tabloid articles and speculation by fans only go so far. The movie business is in a mess. We'll see how that goes. But it would be nice if poor James got built back up.
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