According to a Thursday story in the Journal, sources close to Barbara Broccoli say that she doesn’t think Amazon is a good fit for Bond. The outlet wrote that she “can hold Bond hostage from Amazon for as long as she sees fit,” and quotes a line from her dad in justification: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”

At other times, she has used her own words, referring to people at Amazon as “[expletive] idiots,” according to the Journal (which printed a censored version of her remarks).

Issues between Amazon and Broccoli seemed to pop up amid the MGM acquisition.

During negotiations for the deal, Amazon committed to debuting Bond films in theaters first, rather than on streaming, the Journal wrote. But when executives suggested bringing Bond into the Amazon universe, with something like a TV show, a spinoff for the Moneypenny character or even a female 007 series, Broccoli’s response was often said to be the same: “Did you read the contract?”

...casting director Debbie McWilliams has officially announced her own departure from Commander Bond’s camp. While the decision was made before the recent bombshell, McWilliams' statement contained some rather blistering remarks about the future. As shared by Screen Daily, McWilliams got rather candid about how she feels about the road ahead, which wrapped up with the following sentiment:

Quote

“The thing that made them [the Bond novels] so attractive to us at that particular age [13 y.o.] was that they led you seamlessly from the boy’s stuff you had coveted last year–sports cars equipped with machine-guns–on to the enticements that were just starting to figure in your fantasies, and would dominate them next year–naked odalisques painted gold, and female pilots who unzipped their flying suits from neck to crotch in one sinuous southward motion. Unlike the films, the original Ian Fleming novels fitted all the diverse attractions of Bond’s world together as component pieces of one vision of sexed-up, gentlemanly poise. Sean Connery as Bond showed you the Platonic ideal of a lad; Roger Moore was a burlesque smoothie; but Fleming’s Bond, as well as manifesting vestigial signs of being a character with emotions, so that in The Spy Who Loved Me he actually fell in love with somebody, came from a pre-Suez arcadia, where an amoral, good-looking, violent, upper-class Englishman with an infinite budget upon which to lead the good life, could know what exactly were the very best things to have and to do in every single area of life. If you were Bond, said Goldfinger and Live and Let Die, you would drink Bombay gin and smoke Egyptian cigarettes. You would wear a Savile Row suit and shoot the cuffs of a shirt handmade for you in Jermyn Street as you sat down in Monte Carlo to play baccarat against a countess. Your gun would be a Walther PPK: not some gross destructive cannon, as favoured by vulgar American secret agents, but a suave, neat little gentleman’s murdering-piece, to be used against vile foreign masterminds who were usually not alpha males like yourself, but creepy wet-lipped middle-aged creatures of uncertain antecedents. Your women would be an everchanging harem, gathered from the four corners of the late-imperial world, and their names would be suggestive jokes that would reveal themselves to be really quite rude indeed if you happened to possess the bit of arcane knowledge necessary to understand them. (‘ Pussy Galore’ was once upon a time a name that only sounded pussy-cattish to the majority of British readers. In the 1950s only a select few knew American slang.)


The shopping list went on, seductively unflagging. The version of the good life it was selling was, of course, blatantly obsolete in 1977. Britain had just been bailed out by the IMF in an un-suave, un-supercharged-six-litre-Bentley kind of a way. The Sex Pistols had just released Never Mind the Bollocks. The cigarettes I would start smoking three years later would be B & H, not some special blend flown in from Cairo. I do remember somebody buying a pack of black Balkan Sobranies with gold tips, and feeling very sophisticated with one in my gob, but the effect we were trying for was Roxy Music rather than Casino Royale. The James Bond of the novels was as defunct as Bulldog Drummond. It didn’t matter: the shopping list was not for shopping from.”

Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, Faber and Faber 2010

Ian Fleming's sense of fantasy was exquisite. But Bond was a fantasy from the very beginning, and the films have used that key as a gift to reinvent, and reinvent, and reinvent again this superhero from a world that never existed then, and doesn't exist now.

So it cost Tolkien nothing to write The Lord of the Rings, which meant he could do what he liked. But Jackson, with the bill rising all the time and pressure on his back actually from the money men back in Los Angeles. He had got to think about making a return on the investment, and as a result I think there was on him a strong sense of what I call reverse audience pressure. He got to try to figure out how he was gonna sell this movie and he got to start doing things, which he thought would appeal to the target audience. And the target audience was teenagers. Well as a result, it's quite clear that much of the movie has been teenagerd. Mary and Pippin are much brattier than they are in the original. We have that, well I mean there are some things where you just have to hide your eyes and pretend you weren't there.
But there's Legolas skateboarding down the steps. There's unfortunate jokes about dwarf tossing and things like that. Then I think it could go on, Gimli I slightly regret this, has been turned into a kind of grumpy old dad image. For people to laugh at, as you made more of a figure of fun. We got other things like, [inaudible 00:09:53] Being written out and Éowyn being written back in [I wonder whether that ought to read Glorfindel being written out and Arwen being written back in - for the flight to the Ford], because somebody at some point said we've got to build that character up. Okay, okay, okay. There's half a dozen things like that, and as I say you just have to let them go by. One other thing is it's pretty clear I think that the model they had in mind was Star Wars. They wanted to outdo Star Wars in terms of special FX. That was something that they were dead set on doing. They also realized I think early on, that because of the teenage market and having looked at Star Wars. They didn't need to spend a lot of money on well known actors. Because their target audience was not going to be particular impressed by well known actors. So they could save a good bit of budget there.Tolkien Book to Jackson Script: The Medium and the Message

“This continuous lowering of standards and the acceptance of degraded natural ecosystems is known as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’–a term coined in 1995 by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, who noticed that experts who were charged with evaluating radically depleted fish stocks took as their baseline the state of the fishery at the start of their careers, rather than fish populations in their original state. Hundreds of years ago an area of sea may have been heaving with fish. But scientists’ reference point for ‘natural’ population levels is invariably pinned to levels dating back no more than a few decades from the present. Each generation, Pauly realized, redefines what is ‘natural’.”

— Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree, Picador 2018

But it was never a franchise to take seriously...