Bad News! The Creative Control For James Bond Now Belongs To Amazon

(THR) The James Bond movie franchise has gotten a shake-up, with Amazon MGM Studios and Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli forming a new joint venture to house the movie property’s intellectual property rights.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise, while Wilson and Broccoli will remain co-owners of the 60-year-old property. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, including a vast catalog with more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows.

Since the MGM acquisition, Amazon has held rights to distribute all of the James Bond films, and following completion of the joint venture transaction will control the creative on future productions.

If you're not familiar with the Broccoli family, they're essentially the gatekeepers of the James Bond franchis. Specifically, Barbara Broccoli has has been a producer since the Brosnan era and helped make 2 of the best movies in the franchise in Casino Royale and Skyfall. While you could argue that the franchise, on a whole, has more bad movies than good, Barbara has been in charge for most of the good. 

Handing over the creative control to Amazon feels like a pretty significant blow. They bungled that other major property they've gotten their hands on, Lord of the Rings, pretty significantly after pumped a billion dollars into the process and their track record, in general, hasn't been great with big budget movies. This news immediately brings up the fear that Bond will essentially be stripped down for parts and turned into "Here's the origin series of Q!", "How about a miniseries on M!" which dilutes the main product. That's the studio way, after all. 

However, if Amazon makes a good call casting the new Bond, all that hesitation goes right out the window. Aaron Taylor Johnson, Henry Cavill, etc sign me the fuck up.