What’s the next James Bond movie going to look like?

What direction do you think they’re going to go in? The Daniel Craig movies broke the rules quite a bit and changed what this franchise and character could be. I don’t think they can completely ignore those movies’ impact even though they will be starting over. I think they attempt to strike a middle ground between the Craig films and something more traditional. Moving forward I don’t feel Bond can be a stagnant character anymore. He doesn’t necessarily need to go through a character arc the way Craig did but I think he still needs to be affected by what happens to him in the movies. I also wouldn’t mind some references to Vesper, as if he had his own version of Casino Royale we didn’t see.

I don't know, but I suspect that it will be clumsy and conflicted. They don't really know what to do with the property. How do we keep an anachronism vibrant? At this point, keeping Bond relevant and PC is like attempting to stage Shakespeare in a way that connects with modern audiences. Hey kids, watch Romeo and Juliet staged as a series of TikToks! You'll love it! The only people left who really love Bond as Bond are the people that the industry basically hates (white, male, violence junkies, casual misogynists, nationalists - Bond loves his country). James Bond looks increasingly like "Peacemaker."

whatever they do i sure hope its fun. the craig era kinda forgot that part.

They'll continue to punish Bond for being Bond. Maybe have him keep pining for dead relatives, give him three kids and a three legged transgender dog with hearing impairment.

__________________
A hundred percent death proof.

Tomato Necromancy - now with Vitamin R!
https://www.movieforums.com/communit...ad.php?t=65140

This has made my evening, thank you kindly

What I would like to see them do is go back in time and focus on Cold War era UK history have the next Bond cover from 1946-1961.

You've got four very good plot points

1. India (fall of UK colonialism)
2. Israel (creation of Israel)
3. Russia (death of Stalin)
4. Vietnam (start of the War)

I think that this is the dominant pattern now. We are allowed our allegedly guilty pleasure (OK, you may play with this toy), but we must see our protagonist punished for being a bad sort of person. Logan captures this perfectly. The film kind of kicks the crap out of Logan and we see his pain in losing his old friend and mentor and his odd relationship with his quasi-daughter. He exists only to die. He is there to help BIPOC migrant kids escape to Canada and look after Xavier. He is allowed to exist, so long as he is dying, passing the torch, stepping aside, yielding the spotlight, paying his penance and suffering.

I think Casino Royale is a pretty fun movie and so is Skyfall is in certain ways. The most fun part of No Time to Die is the Cuba sequence. But I get what you mean. The next film should have a lighter touch and be more fun.

Yeah, setting the next Bond in the past has been suggested and could be interesting.

Agreed. Bond should not be a bummer.

While I liked the Craig films overall, yeah, it sometimes felt they weren’t quite sure what do post Casino Royale, going back and forth with how connected things were and how traditional vs untraditional they should make it. And the last few films have been largely occupied with Bond’s relevancy, as you said. Phoebe Waller Bridge, a writer on NTTD, put it well when when she said you don’t have to change Bond or how he views women, just that the films have to view women differently. But I don’t know how much longer they can keep making these movies.

I've said this here before, but it bears repeating that it won't be sufficient to just change the way that the Bond movies portray women, but keep the way that Bond himself treats women exactly the same. For one thing, the movies themselves have already rightfully been getting less sexist for decades now (like Holly Goodhead sarcastically complimenting Bond on his "perceptive" response when he remarks on her being a doctor in Moonraker), and for another, keeping Bond sexist would be odds with his overall heroic, idolised portrayal if you tried to do it in the modern world. For example, if they did this scene today...




...then Dink & Felix (and maybe some bystanders) would likely be giving Bond some dirty looks at the very least, if not giving him a straight-up verbal rebuke, which means that Bond would come off as a creepy *sshole, which would be a far bigger betrayal of the character than making him more feminist. Like, it obviously flew back in the 60's because enough people seemed to be okay with it at the time, and it could be presented as an indication of Bond's status as an overall "alpha male", but you just can't do stuff like that anymore and still have the public view Bond as one of the good guys, you know?

This is what's been missing. I did a whole rant on the most recent movie, but that was one of the things it was missing: fun. I recently re-watched Octopussy (one of my favorite Bond movies) and although it gets a little silly at some points, there's still a lot of fun in it. I love the chase through the marketplace in India.

You’re absolutely right. And I think they did try to evolve Craig’s bond in terms of his relationship with women through the films.

I don’t think it’s necessary to change Bonds view of women, as long as it’s addressed in the movie.

Bond can still be cad, and be portrayed as one, and have his behavior called out as such. He doesn’t have to change all that much throughout the movie itself, but maybe over the course of several films. This is what I enjoyed about Craig’s version of Bond. Each film he was depicted as just sleeping around, when really, he was trying to fill the empty hole in his heart left behind Vesper’s betrayal and ultimate self sacrifice.

He still had his issues, but they were addressed in further films. His distrust of women and his view of treating them as mere means to an end in regards to a mission, or for just simple numbing of his loneliness, became more evident upon each film.

Bond doesn’t need to suddenly be respectful with women, as that’s not interesting enough. It would be far more interesting to see why and how he becomes that way. A redemption arc, as such, like Tony Stark realizing that for all his sleeping around, the woman who meant the most to him was right in front of him all that time (Pepper Potts). The fact he realized what his creations were responsible for helped as well. Even if Stark still had an ego that caused far more issues, it had been shown his heart was in the right place.

Even if he doesn’t, it won’t matter to me any. I don’t demand the heroes to be saints, and indeed, they’re far more fascinating when flawed. To a degree. Treating women as mere sexual desires is far better then to depict him as physically abusive, afterall.

I think Michael Bay would be the perfect director for Bond, because he likes his action, explosions and goodlooking women. However, the Bond producers never want to hire an American director though.

I also find this whole cleaning Bond up with women to be possibly hypocritical, because a lot of feminism nowadays wants to show sexist men how they are, but at the same time, if it's a male movie protagonist, he has to be a noble gentlemen who will always treat women right. Do woman actually want flawless male characters like that as protagonists, when not all men are like that in the real world?

I mean, Cary Joji Fukunaga is American and he directed No Time to Die so...in any case, Bay himself would not be a good fit for the job. There's more to Bond than just the action and the women, after all.

In any case, I tend to be skeptical of the idea that these things have to go back to being "fun" in order to be worth anything. Someone brought up Logan earlier and how it revolved around the idea of its hero being a broken-down husk who had to redeem his failures by protecting the next generation of mutants (also pointedly coded as Mexican illegals who were being hunted down by blond white guys), but that's not exactly comparable to Bond's reinvention because it doesn't contradict Logan's earlier characterisation as a bitter loner whose whole arc is to forgo his self-serving nature for the good of the mutant collective. In any case, I would think there's a difference between pointing out a male character's flaws and demanding that said flaws be eradicated completely - like Wyldesyde said, what matters is whether or not the films do anything interesting with them (which is at once a flaw with earlier films that uncritically invoke them and of the later ones that come up with poor attempts at working around them). I think that's part of why there's an interest in making the next Bond a person of colour beyond just being a diversity hire - there's potentially interesting thematic ground there, which is more than I can say for trying to bring back Moore-grade silliness.

__________________
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I hear what you're saying, but I am not sure that that really works. Bond is our hero and protagonist. He is the audience surrogate. We learn what is happening as Bond learns what is happening. Bond does all the cool stuff we wish we could do. His triumphs are our triumphs. His losses our losses. Bond is everyman daydreaming he was a spy.

We are, for better or worse, implicated in Bond's worldview. At least for an hour or two, we have to imagine that there is at least some sense in which it is not only acceptable but cool to drink, smoke, gamble, fight, and kill. By implication, we have to be able to see it as being temporarily cool (in some hypothetical sense) to objectify women, pump them for information, use them as human shields, and sleep with them rather indiscriminately without commitment of any kind. And I don't think that that gets a pass anymore.

It's a curious thing that everyone is fine with Bond being a casual killer and alcoholic, but get their hackles up when he says something politically incorrect (the freshly made corpse bleeding out behind him is just fine, but by Jingo don't you dare make an off-color quip about that corpse's ethnicity or gender - human beings have dignity!). Extra-judicial killing on foreign soil by a guy who pisses away millions of tax payer dollars on tuxedos, booze, murder gadgets, and high stakes gambling is fine, but we need to check his thinking about women. We're not monsters, after all. So it goes. Our heroes no longer need be reluctant, but they'd damned well better be orthodox when it comes to "progressive" ideas. Times have changed.

Well, considering that Bond kills villains and evil henchmen who tend to kill or injure the innocent people who get in their way of world domination, why would anyone take issue with their deaths? It isn’t like Bond is some sociopath who kills indiscriminately, after all. *

As for his alcoholism, it’s long been accepted as a disease and as such is treated as a flaw in his character, but one that is viewed with compassion, with sympathy. It’s a result of his job, as he needs to drink away his demons, and that’s another testament to Craig’s version where that is evident throughout the series. He’s a haunted man. *

tbh i do not care what they do with the character because i've never even seen Bond as a character really. it's always just *insert actor* trying to be cool/charismatic and nothing more. they won't do it because people eat this kind of sh*t up but i really, really want them to drop the overarching plot elements/character stuff the Craig era did and just have episodic romps. just get a lineup of fun action directors (and stunt teams) to make a bunch of fun action movies plz.