Should There Even be a Bond 26?

For many years what has passed for "news" about the James Bond franchise in the entertainment press has been a mix of stale gossip, banal commentary (what somebody you never heard of thinks they should do with the next Bond film), and baseless speculations about what the next movie may be like--keeping "James Bond" in the public consciousness with clickbaity pseudo-news obscuring the fact that the franchise has been effectively moribund for many years now.

However, February 2025 did bring a genuine piece of news about the franchise, namely that "creative control" of the Everything or Nothing film series (which, excluding such marginal oddities as the eventually MST3K'ed Operation Kid Brother , made all the Bond feature films save for Charles K. Feldman's spoof Casino Royale and Jack Schwartzman's Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again) has passed from the Broccoli film series, where it has been since the series began, to Amazon.

What I have seen of the coverage of the event from the more established quarters of that press reports the fact rather than opinionates about it--perhaps not unreasonably, given that nothing has been said of just what Amazon would be likely to do with that control. Yet, as anyone with any brain function whatsoever would guess, much of the attentive part of the public have been less than delighted with the news, with, indeed, the web quickly becoming awash in recollections of Amazon's thus far highly divisive handling of the Rings of Power series as they make cracks about the James Bond franchise being treated in the same manner. ("Here comes the 'James Bond universe!" for instance, goes one of the less offensive variations on the theme.)

However, the fact of the passing of creative control from one group to another seems to me secondary next to the more fundamental fact that there is really nowhere left to go with the James Bond franchise, which has become superfluous in the pop cultural landscape of today in the way that such creations inevitably do. Once again, from the standpoint of pop cultural history James Bond mattered for two reasons, namely that

1. James Bond does not represent the invention of the fictional spy as "international man of mystery," but rather was an update of the Duckworth Drew-Bulldog Drummond tradition of such espionage adventure for a new generation. Ian Fleming brought the then half century old and fairly shopworn type into the world of the 1950s, while the film series gave him a makeover for the 1960s (and one might add, that made it salable to a far, far broader audience than the one Fleming aimed for when he sat down to write Casino Royale). Thus does that type of character and his associated adventures remain familiar to us today.

2. In providing that update the film series also did much to shape, if not invent, the action movie, and action-adventure franchise, as we know it. Indeed, if most people think of "James Bond" and think "spy," what really made the films about this spy stand so tall at the box office over his predecessors, contemporaries and imitators was that moviegoers thought "James Bond" and thought "action," the films offering a kind and scale of action-adventure spectacle that Hollywood would not even show any understanding of until Star Wars, or seriously compete with until the 1980s.

Both of those contributions are undeniably significant, but the series made them over a half century in the past at this point, as what was unique to the Bond series has become commonplace. After all, not only are we positively saturated in action movies now, but in the '90s Hollywood began cranking out big-budget action-adventures starring spies specifically, with considerable box office success, as seen in the familiarity of Jack Ryan, Harry Tasker, Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, Xander Cage, Dom Toretto and company, and Nick Fury and the rest of the Marvel universe's many secret agents to moviegoers. Since then the continuation of the series has sold tickets on the strength of the "brand name" the series established in its earlier day, viewers' nostalgia for the more memorable moments that have only grown rarer with the years, those occasions when it engaged fans with a more successful reuse of its well-known elements, and the continuous update of the surface gloss in a way that has seen the series-runners following rather than leading the way they did in their heyday (already evident in 1973's Live and Let Die's use of "blaxploitation"). Indeed, on many an occasion the film series has in its imitativeness often seemed to be on the verge of losing everything that gave it any distinction at all (as with 1989's Licence to Kill, which looked and felt like a standard "Someone Killed My Favorite Second Cousin" '80s action movie down to the extra-brutal violence that earned the first cut an R rating, and less popular as this view may be, the ballyhooed reboot of the twenty-first century).

If one accepts that then the right thing to do would be to grant that the series has had a good run and gracefully set it aside--but that, of course, is not how movieland works. The vulgar Dauriats, after all, are in even more complete command of the world of the world than they are the world of publishing, where, as Balzac wrote, the monument a writer "reared with . . . life-blood" is nothing more than "a good or a bad speculation" for a businessman concerned only with how much money he can make, how quickly, with as little effort or risk as possible--all as, alas, the businessmen in question are not necessarily very good at even that.

As it happens the state of the market is not very attractive to anyone seriously thinking about putting out a new Bond film. The reality is that if the biggest blockbusters make as much as ever they did the reduced level of moviegoing compared with even a half decade ago means that with only so many ticket sales to go round there are more flops--with the record in 2023 very instructive here, 2024 less striking that way mainly because the release slate was so thin that year, and 2025 looking very much as if it could be a repeat of 2023 (with the weak January already behind us, and the luke-warm reception of Captain America 4, only affirming such a reading of the situation). Moreover, the Hollywood spy movie boom that began in the '90s gives every impression of unraveling as the latest Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious films underperform, just as the last Bond movie did--North American audiences, certainly, not having much time for No Time to Die, the weakest performer in that market since 1989's flop Licence to Kill, with, especially worrying here, the analysis of the demographics of those who did buy tickets leaving ever less doubt that the Bond franchise was surviving on the interest of an aging fan base, the young scarcely aware and even less interested.

Indeed, all this has likely played its role in delaying the franchise's continuation to date. Still, where a franchise has been successful in the past studio executives are very reluctant to give it up, so much so that they have to lose a lot of money, and that maybe more than once, before they so much as let a franchise lie fallow after a while--and if its real glory days are far behind it no franchise has been as successful for as long as the Bond films. At the same time this tendency reinforced by the fact that never have such decision-makers been so flattered by their courtiers, with the predictable result the increase of their stupidity and arrogance; that so many have been prepared to grade the performance of movies at the box office on a curve, and indeed pass off money-losing flops as great hits; and that there is such an unprecedented hostility to taking chances on new material, and still more, revising the model for pursuing cinematic success in the way that the tightened market and exhaustion of old formulas seems to demand. The result is that, even if we do not see another Bond movie for many, many more years, there is no chance of those who call the shots gracefully letting 007 go.