Too Many Spies?

Originally posted on September 29, 2015.

This past year has been surprisingly crowded with adventures featuring '60's-style spies. Most obviously there has been this spring's hit Kingsman, and then this summer's Spy, Mission: Impossible 5 and The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

One might add, too, that the Fast and Furious franchise has moved into 007 territory--as Roman Pearce quipped pungently in the sixth film (and stayed there in its hit seventh film)--and that the SHIELD organization of the Avengers franchise also was born out of Marvel's jumping on the "spymania" bandwagon back in the '60s.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. apart, all of these films were considerable hits, and that movie's comparative failure at the box office can easily be thought a matter of the original franchise's obscurity, and the tough sell of its atompunk approach, rather than the market's having been over-saturated.

Still, one wonders if this has not been a factor--and what it will bode for the biggest of this year's spy movies, the new Bond film Spectre, when it hits theaters.

My expectation is that this won't make much difference. Just as the public has soaked up the superheroes for nearly two decades, the signs all suggest that a couple of months hence they will be ready to see yet another film derived from a '60s-era spy franchise--the good will the Bond brand picked up with Skyfall, which does not seem to have suffered after the revelations regarding the hacking of Sony, likely to survive this too.

Rather it seems more worthwhile to consider wonder whether the film will match Skyfall's record earnings back in 2012--greater than any prior Bond film, even after inflation.

What do you think? Any predictions?