Okay, while I'm late to the party, I finally saw "No Time to Die" and I'm not happy. Spoiler Alert; they kill James Bond. Unspolier Alert: at the end of the credits they announce "James Bond will return." Why? How? You violate the whole Bond universe then pull this?
I mean, Daniel Craig was an okay Bond, kinda humorless, but after having 5 actors play the part, THIS is the Bond you decide needs to get a special send off? Sean Connery stopped playing Bond 3 times and nobody made this big a deal about it! The creators overseeing Bond have sat through one too many Marvel movies. Do they think they can multi-verse this nonsense now?
The last few years of Bond have been on the shakiest ground. The company got the rights back to "Casino Royale" and decided they would "re-boot" the "series" with a proper version of Ian Fleming's first James Bond book. That gave them an excuse to fire Pierce Brosnan and the remaining old school cast. I mean Pierce Brosnan hadn't been treated this badly since Mrs. Doubtfire kept throwing fruit at him. I mean, you have to realize that from Connery to Brosnan, it was the same Bond timeline. As actors aged out or passed away, they were replaced with replacements and only sometimes re-cast.
Sure, they called it a "re-boot" or "re-launch" but still kept Judi Dench as M. Fine, we'll go along with this being a "new" James Bond, his "origin story." Then for the next batch of films they go making constant call-backs to all the early Bond films: the Aston Martin, the dead girl covered in oil like in Goldfinger, using the Bond theme from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" throughout "No Time to Die." When "Skyfall" came out, word was they wanted Sean Connery to play the groundskeeper. I'm glad he turned them down. The producers just stopped pretending this was a different time line, wanting their cake and eating it, too.
Then there's the whole Blofeld situation. The Bond people lost the rights to the character Blofeld and SPECTRE sometime doing the 1970s. The last (uncredited) appearance of the character was in the cold opening to Roger Moore's "For Your Eyes Only." Then they got the rights back. It's a big deal. They bring Blofeld back in the movie "SPECTRE." They even named the movie "SPECTRE." The whole movie makes out that it was Blofeld behind all the villains of the Craig-era Bond (even though nobody mention SPECTRE the whole time. The company had gone through all the legal hassle and money to get the rights to the character back, Bond's main nemesis, and what do they do? Kill him in the next movie. Money well spent, right?
I mean if the Simpsons can figure out how do keep an 8-year old character around for 30 years, you'd think the producers could figure out how to keep James Bond going by simply replacing the actor. They've only done it six times already.
I don't know how they are going to re-set Bond in this new age of Hollywood where they redo the same IP content over and over but it doesn't bode well if they're simply going to toss the game board every time an actor quits.
I mean, Daniel Craig was an okay Bond, kinda humorless, but after having 5 actors play the part, THIS is the Bond you decide needs to get a special send off? Sean Connery stopped playing Bond 3 times and nobody made this big a deal about it! The creators overseeing Bond have sat through one too many Marvel movies. Do they think they can multi-verse this nonsense now?
The last few years of Bond have been on the shakiest ground. The company got the rights back to "Casino Royale" and decided they would "re-boot" the "series" with a proper version of Ian Fleming's first James Bond book. That gave them an excuse to fire Pierce Brosnan and the remaining old school cast. I mean Pierce Brosnan hadn't been treated this badly since Mrs. Doubtfire kept throwing fruit at him. I mean, you have to realize that from Connery to Brosnan, it was the same Bond timeline. As actors aged out or passed away, they were replaced with replacements and only sometimes re-cast.
Sure, they called it a "re-boot" or "re-launch" but still kept Judi Dench as M. Fine, we'll go along with this being a "new" James Bond, his "origin story." Then for the next batch of films they go making constant call-backs to all the early Bond films: the Aston Martin, the dead girl covered in oil like in Goldfinger, using the Bond theme from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" throughout "No Time to Die." When "Skyfall" came out, word was they wanted Sean Connery to play the groundskeeper. I'm glad he turned them down. The producers just stopped pretending this was a different time line, wanting their cake and eating it, too.
Then there's the whole Blofeld situation. The Bond people lost the rights to the character Blofeld and SPECTRE sometime doing the 1970s. The last (uncredited) appearance of the character was in the cold opening to Roger Moore's "For Your Eyes Only." Then they got the rights back. It's a big deal. They bring Blofeld back in the movie "SPECTRE." They even named the movie "SPECTRE." The whole movie makes out that it was Blofeld behind all the villains of the Craig-era Bond (even though nobody mention SPECTRE the whole time. The company had gone through all the legal hassle and money to get the rights to the character back, Bond's main nemesis, and what do they do? Kill him in the next movie. Money well spent, right?
I mean if the Simpsons can figure out how do keep an 8-year old character around for 30 years, you'd think the producers could figure out how to keep James Bond going by simply replacing the actor. They've only done it six times already.
I don't know how they are going to re-set Bond in this new age of Hollywood where they redo the same IP content over and over but it doesn't bode well if they're simply going to toss the game board every time an actor quits.
