James Bond was once entrance and middle on the 2025 Academy Awards – and in a fairly curious means.
In a musical quantity, Lisa of Blackpink, Doja Cat and Raye sang the Bond theme songs “Live and Let Die,” “Diamonds Are Forever” and “Skyfall,” respectively. No Bond movies have been nominated for an award, and none of those singers has a connection to the Bond franchise, even though they did all lately collaborate at the unmarried “Born Again.”
The peculiar workout felt much less like a party and extra like a large flashing query mark for a display screen icon whose long term hasn’t ever felt extra unsure.
Why would the Broccoli circle of relatives, which has lengthy held the rights to Bond motion pictures thru their corporate, EON, cede regulate of the movie sequence to a tech spouse they’ve been at odds with?
Two probabilities have emerged.
First, EON’s Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the stepson and daughter of mythical EON manufacturer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, can have reached some extent of ingenious exhaustion. There may well be one thing to this concept. In line with Puck’s Matthew Belloni, the 83-year-old Wilson and 64-year-old Broccoli had been having problem working out their subsequent step after 2021’s “No Time to Die.”
A 2nd explanation why may well be Amazon’s impatience with EON. In December 2024, The Wall Side road Magazine reported that Barbara Broccoli balked when Amazon Studios govt Jennifer Salke proposed a number of Bond by-product tasks, together with a Bond sequence with a feminine lead, for High Video. Possibly annoyed with the stalemate, Amazon can have made Wilson and Broccoli an be offering they couldn’t refuse to get them out of the best way and get manufacturing of Bond content material rolling.
The idea is without a doubt intriguing. However a extra central query shouldn’t be overpassed: the “what.”
What, exactly, has Amazon MGM bought? And what can it if truth be told do with the Bond tale?
Breaking down the Bond rights
In my analysis at the 007 franchise, I’ve came upon that this belongings hasn’t ever been a conventional movie sequence.
Lengthy sooner than “Star Wars” introduced in 1976 and the Wonder Cinematic Universe introduced in 2008, Bond trusted a spread of mediums to inform its tale.
The Bond franchise started in 1953, no longer with a movie however with a singular, Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale.” 12 months later, “Casino Royale” was once tailored for American TV as a reside anthology display. 4 years after that, in 1958, a well-liked Bond caricature made its debut.
It was once best in 1962, with “Dr. No,” starring Sean Connery, that the now-iconic movie sequence started.
Since then, James Bond has been spun off right into a youngsters’s animated display, choose-your-own-adventure books, a “Young Bond” novel sequence, video video games, a fact display, radio dramas and extra.
Right here’s what’s a very powerful: With its new deal, Amazon MGM has a controlling stake best within the rights that EON holds. EON has authorized the precise to supply long term movies and TV presentations from Fleming since 1961. EON secured international vending rights in 1964 and manufacturing rights to video video games within the early Nineties.
Different 007 media – the literary, comedian and audio sequence – are controlled through the Fleming Property and Ian Fleming Publications.
EON produced many of the James Bond movies, akin to 1969’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Carrier.’
EON/United Artists
The James Bond media franchise is what I name a shared rights and licensing community.
Nobody corporate controls the entire Bond rights, and nobody corporate produces all of Bond media. Even though this association is an advanced one, the sharing and licensing of rights has allowed Bond to emerge as a profitable and fecund product line. In line with my calculations, it now boasts over 330 authentic tales in 72 years of media manufacturing.
In different phrases, Bond is a lot more than the 25 movies launched through EON.
James Bond’s many lives
Till now, rights sharing and licensing have ensured that the Bond franchise stays creatively distinct from “Star Wars” and Wonder.
The corporations that produce those sequence – LucasFilm and Wonder Studios – are owned through The Walt Disney Corporate. With their rights pooled below one company entity that still oversees all manufacturing, “Star Wars” and Wonder were in a position to force towards excessive ranges of ingenious consistency and harmony amongst their tales. Throughout movies, TV, comics and video video games, “Star Wars” and Wonder aspire to what media consultants name “transmedia storytelling.”
By way of sharing rights, the Bond franchise has arrived at an excessively other form of storytelling, one who fragments the tale and multiplies the James Bonds to be skilled throughout distinct media. The impact isn’t transmedia storytelling, or perhaps a Wonder-style multiverse. In Bond, characters can’t go over to trade realities and meet different variations of themselves.
James Bond exists in many alternative worlds and leads many alternative lives.
The James Bond in Ian Fleming’s novels has a biography that differs from the model of Bond who seems in different media.
Jim/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
To call a couple of: There’s the Bond of Fleming’s Fifties and Nineteen Sixties novels, who loses his past love, Vesper Lynd, and hunts down her killers, who’re participants of SMERSH, the assassination arm of Soviet intelligence companies. Fleming’s Bond additionally lives on within the novels of Kingsley Amis and John Gardner, that have been printed within the Seventies and Eighties.
There’s EON’s silver display screen Bond, who, from 1962 to 2002, by no means falls in love with Vesper, however loses his spouse, Tracy di Vicenzo, to the crime syndicate SPECTRE and stays scarred through the loss. And within the trendy generation, there’s the Bond who seems in writer Samantha Weinberg’s “Moneypenny Diaries.” Printed from 2005 to 2008, the sequence depicts a model of Bond who has retired to a small Scottish isle together with his lover, MI6’s Omit Moneypenny.
The impact of Bond’s shared construction is what I dub “threaded storytelling.” The novels provide quite a lot of variations of Bond’s existence, at other issues in historical past. The movie sequence creates two of its personal. The comedian sequence gives but extra lives of 007.
Every model of Bond runs along the others available in the market, specializing in a Bond persona who exists best inside of his distinctive tale international. This offers lovers an unpredictable, ever-expanding canon of reports to apply or even examine, like one grand spot-the-difference recreation in time.
The place subsequent for Bond?
The deal between Amazon MGM and EON awaits regulatory approval within the U.S. and U.Ok.
If it is going thru, Amazon MGM may have a robust belongings on its palms. Over the a long time, EON has strengthened positive components to the nature and the tale: James Bond is a debonair hitman. MI6 leader M offers him high-stakes missions. MI6 armorer Q suits him with the newest devices. And Bond lives massive, taking part in gorgeous ladies, fantastic eating, Savile Row models and Omega timepieces.
Amazon MGM is not likely to tinker with those Bondian components. They’re additionally more likely to maintain the flicks’ “Bond formula” – the gun barrel visible that kicks off each and every movie, elaborately designed credit score sequences, film-specific theme songs, and the remaining identify card that reads, “James Bond Will Return.”
But some lovers concern that Amazon MGM will broaden “woke” storylines. Others foresee the product being diluted with numerous streaming by-product sequence.
To me, the extra intriguing chance is whether or not Amazon will attempt to create a extra unified Bond universe, comparable to the Wonder Cinematic Universe. Sure, the Fleming Property will proceed to regulate the novels, comics and radio. However with ingenious regulate over EON’s rights, Amazon MGM may just, in concept, broaden an elaborate transmedia technique by no means sooner than explored on this franchise.
A relaunched movie sequence, in all probability serving as Amazon MGM’s “mothership,” would feed into satellite tv for pc sequence in video video games and streaming presentations. Those video games and presentations, in flip, would tie into and amplify the universe of the flicks.
Have been that to occur, the Bond franchise would in reality input a brand new segment and chance dropping a lot of the ingenious flexibility it’s possessed previously.
