Will Christopher Nolan Be Directing Bond 26?: Reflections on the Chatter

In the two years since the release of No Time to Die the entertainment press has not had much to work with while keeping up the chatter about the next Bond film but rehashing old Bond trivia and speculations and suggestions about what they think the producers might do, or should do, in the next installment they are all absolutely sure is coming.

The result is that when reports of Christopher Nolan being up to helm a rebooted Bond franchise--with the reboot perhaps seeing the original Bond novels refilmed in their own periods--started to circulate they were quick to talk all this up.

Since then things have quieted down--for now, at least. (Even if there is nothing much to it in the absence of any real news people will probably resuscitate the idea.)

Still, the idea is not wholly implausible, given the direction of the films in recent years. Back in Albert Broccoli's time a Nolan would never have been given such a chance--but the franchise has gone from being "creative producer"-run as it was with Broccoli, to looking to critics' darling-type would-be auteurs (Marc Foster, Sam Mendes, Danny Boyle, Cary Fukunaga) to freshen things up. And Nolan in particular seems to have been on their minds for a long time, given how much the rebooted Bond films followed in the footsteps of Nolan's Batman trilogy.

Thus did they begin with an origin story about Bond becoming Bond, recounted in a tone some call "dark and gritty" (and others call "market pessimism"). Thus did they use for the big twist in Skyfall the big twist in The Dark Knight (that the first Avengers film and Star Trek and doubtless others have also ripped off). Thus did they give the reboot they had likewise made "more personal" an ending as well as a beginning, with the series ending with the hero.

It does not seem unreasonable that spending so much time "borrowing" Nolan's ideas they would have thought "Why not just actually get Nolan?" Especially given that it would automatically get a press that loves him, and his sizable online following, very excited about the project.

This would seem all the more the case given how the last few years have gone for Nolan--with Nolan directing a spy thriller of his own in Tenet that was well-received by critics and fans (even if the pandemic crushed its chances of being a blockbuster); while in a summer in which the film studios were failing miserably in getting the public to the theater Nolan somehow made his weirdo postmodern art film about a scientist from the 1940s into a near-billion dollar blockbuster. It would seem the more natural still if the Bond franchise's runners are at all enticed by the idea of following after the continuation novels by sending the screen Bond back to his own era (given that Nolan has helmed commercially successful period pieces not just in Oppenheimer, but Dunkirk).

Still, that a Nolan-helmed Bond film may seem plausible for all these reasons does not actually mean that this is the direction being taken--or even that the result actually stands much chance of working. After all, Nolan succeeded here in giving the public something other than a franchise film and now they want him to . . . make a franchise film just as those franchise films are failing. Perhaps a period franchise film of exactly the kind whose riskiness the colossal failure of Indiana Jones 5 just underlined, to which little really new can be brought at this stage of things, let alone anything really new that a vast audience would care to see. I certainly do not think the general moviegoing audience really wants something faithful to the Fleming originals--while I suspect that any such approach would make much more sense on the small screen than on the large, a very different kind of project from the one we are talking about here.