When should they have stopped making Bond films?

Another Bond movie? They need, at least, a very long hiatus, a mutual agreement to also not make another Star Wars variant until all of the current movie-going population has died or forgotten. Connery's Bond went stale way back then, with a slight uptick when Craig revived the franchise. All of the "in-betweens" are forgotten to me, but it's just time for a new character who's not rooted in the Cold War.

I know that won't happen as long as the franchise is profitable, however, because the studio accountants are the ultimate arbiters of movie virtue and these flicks all make money.

The franchise was able to elide the whole Cold War thing for a good long while by just pitting Bond against less overtly political enemies like a terrorist organisation or a rich maniac and that persisted well into the Brosnan run (after getting the post-Cold War adventure out of the way in GoldenEye, of course, and even then that still came down to a one-on-one between Bond and a rogue MI6 agent). There's always the question of how overtly political a Bond movie can get before it becomes a problem or not and that's why they tend to settle on these simplistic counter-terrorist plots more than anything else (and even now they still stick to the idea of them being cultured white European villains more than anything else so as to keep the targets acceptable).

I think it becomes a false dichotomy when it presents those as the only two possible options with the implication that one is inherently good while the other is not - placing that kind of good/bad comparison on the two sides is the "false" part of the dichotomy. The double-standard doesn't automatically set in if you have a female protagonist (though I am reminded of Atomic Blonde having such a protagonist hook up with a woman who later ends up dead because of their connection in a fashion very similar to a Bond film) - it just becomes a very noticeable pattern when a significant cross-section of the women who hook up with Bond across the franchise do end up punished for it in one way or another (often by death) while he escapes mostly unscathed by the experiences save for occasionally being genuinely traumatised by the loss e.g. Tracy or Vesper. Too often that kind of loss is just glossed over as part of the fun ride that is your typical Bond movie and only contributes to the idea of them being shallow at best and toxic at worst.

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Oh okay, but do the movies present chaste and promiscuous as only two possible options, or was it being said that some writers do this, but not necessarily Bond? When I said that if they had a female spy/assassin who was promiscuous and that no one would be bothered by if it was a female, perhaps promiscuous was the wrong choice of word. I just meant to say a woman who as promiscuous as much as Bond, but I shouldn't have used the word promiscuous perhaps.

Men have done most of the screenwriting for the history of film, as well as most of the directing. To say that women have written men therefore it's all equal seems kind of disingenuous to the conversation we're having.
A false dichotomy doesn't mean one of the two choices is false it means the idea that there is a dichotomy is false. That it's either/or.

I guess it would depend on how you define promiscuity in this particular context. With Bond, one could question as to how much his sexual exploits are just part of the job to him - when he fails to seduce the female villain in Thunderball, he declares that he only did it as part of his mission (and one can presume that any explicitly villainous women are trying to do the same thing to him). You'd have to go through the franchise film by film to determine which instances count as work or fun (or possibly both) to him, though I guess there is the matter of how there are few comparable heroic female characters within the franchise to use as a basis of comparison.

Oh okay I see. Well two of my favorite movies, Thelma and Louise and Set It Off, were both writtten by female writers, who wrote male characers in those movies. Dirty Dancing was writtten by a female writer and has male characters in it. I am not saying it happens as often, but I am saying I know movies written by female writers with male characters, so I felt that it's okay for a writer to write for the opposite gender and both genders of writers do it. I wasn't comparing who does it more, I just felt that both are allowed to.

Oh well the way I was defining promiscuity was a character who hooks up with multiple people throughout the movie, but I shouldn't have used that word for that. But to reiterate, I feel that if a female character were to hook up with 3 men per movie in a franchise, that audiences wouldn't have a problem with it, and they seem more botthered by Bond doing it, because he is a male, but I could be wrong. It wouldn't bother me if a female spy did that with 3 men per movie in a series, either, I am good with either gender doing it. But I thought more people might be bothered by a male doing it than female.

Either way, it may be shallow entertainment but I like that when it comes to Bond, and I am not always looking for deep entertainment, if that's bad...

Not bad at all. I didn't know anybody cared about Bond sleeping with everybody, it's kinda his thing. I think some people probably object to the "woman in a fridge" trope that seems to come along with it, but I'm not sure I agree with them.

Some Bond movies handle the women in a fridge thing better than others. When it comes to the how it was said before on here, that the Bond women are punished for sleeping with him, I never thought of it as the women being punished like it was suppose to be there fault. I always felt it was Bond's fault for risking them and putting them in danger, when he does that. In Moonraker he does this to a woman to get information out of her. When she is killed, he doesn't know about it.

In Tomorrow Never Dies I felt it was handled better, as when Bond finds out that he got the woman killed, he has this 'what have I done' type of reaction, which I thought was more fitting. In Goldfinger Bond had a similar reaction, and his boss chews him out for it, placing the blame on him as to why she was killed. Some Bond movies handle it better than others. Actually come to think of it, the Connery ones handled it better than the Moore ones perhaps, accept for Diamonds for Forever.

Some Bond movies have Bond women that are more competant than others for sure. My favorite Bond women are Tracy Bond and Xenia Onatopp who are not the women in fridge types at all, I don't think, if I am using that context right.

hehe, every bond movie that comes out, you see interviews pre-release, and every time the new bond girl actress is like "this time I'm not the usual sugar-coated damsel-in-distress, gushing 'oh James' every 5 mins, I actually give Bond a run for his money".

In reality I'd say it's a small minority of movies where the girl is a helpless damsel in distress, and even then not that much - In From Russia with Love she steps in to save bond from Rosa Kleb's shoe, in Live and Let Die Jane Seymour busts out some karate kicks, Stacey in View to a Kill gets well stuck in when there's a fight at her house. Britt Eckland from Man with a Golden Gun is the only one I remember as being a real 'dumb blonde'. They are given some crumby lines though, so I do have some sympathy for them.

My favourite is Fiona Volpe, the villain in Thunderball - she had everything.

Is the 'woke crowd' really a thing btw? I see more complaints about 'the woke crowd' in the media than I see complaints 'from the woke crowd', I've heard people talk about next Bond being a woman or non-white for over 20 years and it's still not happened. I recall people huffing and puffing about a reviewer saying some people might not like Dunkirk for not having any black characters, but was there any published review or comment where some actually DID complain about that?

Judy Dench's M gives him a good tongue-lashing for Gemma Arterton's Agent Fields' death and he risks his life to come back and insist that Fields' bravery be in her report. It's actually one of the scenes that makes me like that movie as much as I do.

I know, right?

Reminder to stay on the cinematic side of this issue and all that. No issues, just a preemptive thing.

Anyway, my personal experience is that nobody has a good sense of how prevalent things are, in either direction, because of the subtle ways people can curate their news sources. There are a lot of things "everybody knows" on one side of the divide that seem to never happen on the other, on a host of issues, because some things get passed around in some circles and not in others.

Increasingly I think people's sense of the world has less to do with their facts and more to do with which things they decide (arbitrarily, for the most part) are either rare, or else deeply emblematic, and I expect which they choose is mostly determined by their priors.

The repetitive nature of these franchises seems to say less about social biases (although that's certainly there too) but more about the accountants. These kind of movies are "good" when they return much more than they cost...a fifty million dollar movie making 500 million, and bad when they lose bucks. Sadly, you just can't be TOO cynical about this. Expenses and revenue are counted and then stock prices weigh in on how good of an investment the movie is. For these franchises, Bond movies are more like a new kind of fast food than they are like an innovation in fine cuisine.

I don't think they should ever stop making James Bond films, while the series has it's hits and misses the general quality of the work tends to be fairly high. Also consider the genre, travelogue action films don't really exist outside of Bond. Fast and Furious sort of touched on them but they are nearing the end of the course.


I also don't see the problem with a Bond film coming out once every 2-3 years, you aren't dealing with the same level of market saturation with something like Marvel/DC films.