What Will James Bond’s New Era Actually Look Like?

3 min readIt’s hard not to get swept up in the James Bond speculation. Has Callum Turner landed the role, as reports suggest? Does Jack Lowden still have a shot? Or will they just give up, feed a JPEG of Sean Connery into ChatGPT, and see what it pumps out? It’s all a fun guessing game, really. But one factor is arguably more important than the man playing 007: the new media machine behind it all.Daniel Craig's fifteen-year tenure churned through four directors—Martin Campbell, Marc Forster, Sam Mendes, and Cary Joji Fukunaga—who all operated under the watchful eye of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Their family had held creative control since the film franchise's inception. That was, until the pair sold their share to Amazon last year. Bezos and co.'s first order of business was to hire Dune director Denis Villeneuve, arguably the franchise's first-ever auteur, alongside Peaky Blinders scribe Steven Knight—and it's their collective vision that will really define this new era.Villeneuve is, in my mind, the philosopher king of modern blockbuster cinema. On top of the scale, flair and the star-studded casts that he brings to his grandest films, including the Dune trilogy, he can be trusted to pose challenging ethical and political questions. He'll no doubt bring that same lens to a franchise that has tried, with varying degrees of success, to address hot-button issues.Ian Fleming's original novels, and the early films to an extent, position Bond as a near-unstoppable, ass-kicking international superspy serving "Queen and country" with little complaint; a wish-fulfilling antidote to the slow but terminal decline of the British Empire.On-screen, that approach started to shift in the 1990s. Pierce Brosnan's smirking spy is mocked as a relic of the Cold War. Daniel Craig's grittier films took that further, reckoning with the character's increasingly outmoded presence in a culture that had moved beyond sexist wisecracks and silly gadgets. There was plenty of flag-waving along the way, but Broccoli's films nonetheless asked questions about Britain's standing on the world stage. They even touched on decolonization, albeit on the surface level.Bringing a Canadian on board may have raised the eyebrows of those expecting Bond 26 to carry on with that kind of national introspection, especially in this current moment, as the exponential rise of the far-right that's swept across Europe in the past ten years has dug its claws deep into British culture. But Villeneuve's filmography is proof that he's up to that job, if he so chooses. Sicario was a refreshingly thoughtful take on a cartel thriller that allowed him to question the morality, stances, and intervention of the CIA in an international operation. Equally, Dune interrogates a messianic white savior in Paul Atreides and whether simply positioning oneself as a hero is enough to make yourself one.Amazon's involvement is where this potentially gets complicated. The pressure is on for the tech giant to produce an explosion-heavy, action-packed money-spinning Bond blockbuster with an international, classic silver screen appeal: in other words, to not screw it up and get their money's worth. Will they be as interested in dealing with Britain's post-imperial neurosis as the Broccoli family were? Or will Bezos’s Bond be laser-focused on grander, more universal anxieties (if even that)?If one person can stop that from happening, it’s Steven Knight. From big-screen projects like Spencer, his take on Princess Diana’s troubled years in the palace, through to series like Peaky Blinders, House of Guinness and SAS Rogue Heroes, questions of national and cultural identity are central to his writing. Plus, as you'd expect, he's a proper Bond fan.“It's fantastic to be invited to do it—I can't wait to get started,” he told The Times last year. “I'm hoping that, being a Bond fan for so many years, it will be imbued into me and I will be able to produce something that's the same but different, and better, stronger and bolder.”Hand-in-hand with Villeneuve, we could be in for something special.