Quentin Tarantino's Recent Thoughts on the Bond Series

Quentin Tarantino name has come up before in relation to the Bond films.

Back in the '90s he actually aspired to make a film adaptation of Casino Royale.

That ship sailed a very long time ago--as the Casino Royale that actually kicked off the reboot made clear. But he did recently discuss the Bond film series in the Deadline interview from a little while back, during which he suggested that EON go back to the books and actually adapt the books.

The idea has the virtue that, in contrast with most remakes, which bring nothing new to the table, those movies would be genuinely different from what was made before, and from anything out there today.

However, "different" does not mean an audience would necessarily exist for them.

Let us, for the moment, not belabor the well-known, much-chewed over matter of the social sentiments of the books. We all know how absolutely intolerable they would be to respectable opinion--and the fact that, while the more overt racism may be removable without damaging anything essential, the gender politics could not be altered without making a mockery of any pretense to faithfulness. The idea has at least three other strikes against it:

1. Filmed as they are the novels would be period pieces--a tough sell to American audiences these days. (Indeed, I recently remarked the anomalousness of Indiana Jones as a popular success given this trait of theirs--and counted it as one of the factors working against that film's box office success.)

2. The narrative structure of the books--which are less the stuff of action movies than "slow burn" thrillers unlikely to be very exciting to today's readers. (Indeed, as Raymond Benson's stuff makes clear even readers of Bond novels expect something different these days, never mind viewers of Bond films.)

3. Much of what made the books interesting to readers when they came out is simply not going to reach today's audience. What was glamorous by the standard of '50s Britain is less impressive today in an era in which working people may be struggling to keep themselves in modest shelter and adequate food, but the level of luxury presented by pop cultural fantasy has exploded right along with the fortunes of the richest. Meanwhile the agonies over the place of Britain and its elite in the world that seems to have been so bound up with the books' reception are also unlikely to resonate with a wide audience (and none at all outside Britain).

There therefore seems no question of any such thing being blockbuster material--while the kind of mid-range movie such productions could have been is simply not getting made anymore, certainly not for theatrical release, while streaming is becoming ever more penurious. One might imagine as an alternative the adventures of James Bond being adapted as a TV series--with, perhaps, a few novels squeezed into a particular season. (I could see, for instance, Casino Royale through From Russia with Love as a season, ending with the cliffhanger of Bond's poisoning; Dr. No and Goldfinger and the For Your Eyes Only short story sequence the basis of a season two; and the books between Thunderball and The Man with the Golden Gun as the basis for one long arc, maybe wrapping up the sequence with another two seasons.) Yet I am doubtful that very many would be persuaded to stick with Bond through it all (again, period pieces are tough sells, and even if I rejected belaboring them there are those politics), while I have seen little evidence of either Everything Or Nothing productions, or Amazon, being up for it, making it much more a provocative notion than a serious proposition.