After Spectre: A Prediction

Originally posted on December 18, 2015.

As I noted in a previous post, Spectre has not been the triumph hoped for by the producers or the fans--but, as it adds to an already $800 million global gross, it is also no flop.

Of course, neither was Die Another Day, or Moonraker, or Quantum of Solace a flop for that matter. But in each of those cases a decision was taken to follow a very different path with the next Bond movie, and it does not seem impossible that this will be the case here.

What direction might that be? Nothing so radical as the retro approach that the various novelists Glidrose has commissioned to write new James Bond novels (which reached a new peak with Horowitz's '50s-era Trigger Mortis, set just after the events of Goldfinger).

Rather I think that we will see the filmmakers back off to some extent from the course they established in Skyfall, and continued in Spectre--a more "mythic" approach to Bond, which not incidentally makes much more of his personal history. I suspect also that, just as happened after Quantum of Solace, they will hesitate to go with a political plot (which, somehow, always leads to exaggerated criticisms in big, popular movies). Instead we are apt to get a shorter, brisker Bond movie, with less aspiration to be epic, but more emphasis on simple fun--which will also leave the filmmakers more hard-pressed to make the twenty-fifth installment in the series headed our way in the next few years somehow feel like more than just "another" Bond movie, itself now just another example of the would-be blockbusters that have come to saturate the multiplex year-round.