Jeff Bezos Just Paid $1 Billion for the Exclusive Rights to Turn the 007 Franchise into Hot Garbage

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There's a sort of commonly held belief that just because there have been 25 James Bond movies, that makes it the greatest film franchise of all time. I mean, it may be, just on sheer volume alone. But that doesn't mean they've all been masterpieces. Or even consistently good. Overall, the 007 films have been very much like the musical tribute to them during the Oscars this week: Wildly inconsistent:

Just because they're iconic doesn't make them high quality. The Sean Connery ones are considered the gold standard. And I'm sure in their time they were groundbreaking to the target audience of Greatest Generation and Korean War Veterans who had no patience for smelly hippies and Beatles music and demanded the escapism of a handsome, suave, fearless man with a License to Kill and as much access to insane gadgets as top quality international pussy. And there's no denying how cool Connery and those devices were. One time I took the family to the Spy Museum in DC, and we all had the same visceral reaction to the Aston Martin on display. You can't fake that kind of generational appeal

But like I said in a post about Fort Knox, those movies haven't held up well. They're boring. As beloved as Goldfinger is, there's a 20 minute golf scene in the second act that brings the whole thing to a crashing halt. 

The Roger Moore ones had their moments. But quickly degenerated into self-parody, with a winking, smirking Bond boning female spies one-third his age on the Space Shuttle or whatever. The Timothy Dalton ones tried a hard pivot into the realities of HIV, with 007 keeping it in his pants, which lost a lot of its appeal. And it's audience. My sons grew up on the video games of the Pierce Brosnan era. And the movies were an upgrade for the most part. But they also included Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist named Dr. Christmas Jones. 

So they've got a lot to answer for. 

Even the Renaissance that came with Daniel Craig, going after the same vibe as the Jason Bourne franchise was all over the map. And Craig himself pulled an Aaron Rodgers end of his career, threatening to quit but coming back for some regrettable, lackluster performances instead of listening to his own better judgement. 

Which has led to the second longest period without a Bond movie since it all began in the early '60s. This year will be the fourth since No Time to Die. And no one has exactly been demanding a new one. But it's impossible not to notice Hollywood is fresh out of ideas (unless you consider Saw XI, a live action How to Train Your Dragon and another Jurassic Park sequel ideas), so it was inevitable some studio would step up and give all those employees standing around doing nothing something to keep them busy. So it's time to reboot for the 8th or 9th time. 

Enter the man who is practically the prototypical Bond Villain himself, Jeff Bezos:

Source - [T]here was one small but uncomfortable moment [at the Oscars] you might have missed.

That’d be when the camera panned into the audience to Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.

The whole reason the Academy decided to devote six full minutes of the ceremony to Bond music was that Broccoli and Wilson were the recipients of this year’s honorary Irving G. Thalberg Oscar, an accolade bestowed upon them in November at the Governors Awards to celebrate the half-siblings’ 30 years of unwavering stewardship over the spy franchise they inherited in 1995 from their father, legendary Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. “Let me tell you, they don’t just produce Bond movies,” one-time Bond Girl Halle Berry gushed about Broccoli and Wilson in her introduction from the podium, “they were the heart and soul of this franchise for decades.”    

There was just one small problem: Days before the ceremony, Broccoli and Wilson announced they were selling Bond to Amazon.

It was a bombshell development that caught much of Hollywood — including, clearly, Oscar’s musical producers — by surprise. What could have compelled them to do it? …

More pointedly, what does the sale mean for Bond’s future? Amazon, of course, had purchased MGM, Bond’s longtime home, in 2022 for $8.5 billion, mostly to get its hands on 007 IP and build it into a Marvel-style universe filled with bingeable TV spinoffs. The only things stopping them were Broccoli and Wilson, who had very different ideas for their father’s legacy, as well as a decades-long deal with MGM guaranteeing them creative dominion over all things Bond. But now that they’re out of the picture, Amazon can do whatever it wants. A TV show about Moneypenny? Why not. A prequel about Blofeld’s teenage years? Sure. More 007 game shows? Please no. But anything is possible. Amazon is now free to milk the franchise dry.    

And there it goes. This is how the 007 world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

The people who've owned and protected this IP ever since the inherited the rights from their father (who bought them from Ian Fleming who created the character) and protected it all these decades, had a price. We all do. Bezos has a streaming service to fill, and cash to burn. So the simplest solution is to take some existing, recognizable brand, water it down with as much cheap, factory made, mass produced, low quality content as possible, just to fill viewing hours. Like Hollywood Reporter says, entire TV series about minor side characters and origin stories nobody asked for. 

Can Amazon possibly resist making Young Q, about a precocious, resourceful boy genius who's brilliant when it comes making little inventions that look like ordinary devices in his parents' basement? It practically writes itself! But they'll have AI do it. Or worse, the same talentless hacks who've been systematically destroying JRR Tolkien's footnotes and appendices with the unwatchable Rings of Power Bezos also spent a billion on. 

And let's not kid ourselves. There's not a chance on Bezos' Green Earth Amazon's going to cast a debonair, British, extremely heterosexual leading man type to play Bond. Like all the fans want, Henry Cavill:

The character is going to be "reimagined" somehow. A strong, stunning and brave 105 pound woman who can kick henchman ass across every continent on the globe and doesn't need a man's help or whomever. But the odds of it being a traditional 007 in the Connery or Craig sense is practically non-existent. If you're looking for that kind of James Bond, your best bet is just to find the one my kids grew up on: Goldeneye for Nintendo GameBoy.