Will There be an Audience for James Bond in 2028?

As the pandemic proved to be a lingering phenomenon I came to expect that it would mean a long-term structural change for the cinematic market through its changing of habits and shuttering of theaters. I doubted that expectation for a while after seeing what big hits Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun 2 and Avatar 2 became, and thought that the return of a pre-pandemic-style release slate in 2023 would see the business bounce back completely or close to it--then as 2023, and 2024, and now 2025 proceeded, saw that there had indeed been long-term structural change, with American box office grosses down 40 percent from their 2015-2019 level for two years running and the international market too taking what seems an equally bad hit. With Americans now going to the movies about twice a year instead of the 3-4 times seen before tentpoles became a much riskier proposition, the fate of franchises like the recently triumphant Marvel Cinematic Universe exemplary of the situation. An occasional blockbuster of the conventional type can make as much as ever it did (as the aforementioned films show), but underperformance was much more common than before, with the list of undeniable catastrophic flops mounting (The Flash, Captain Marvel 2, etc.), as the successes proved to be more targeted and frankly fresher hits (from a Taylor Swift concert movie, to our video game adaptations, to an Oppenheimer or a Sinners)--with this going even for movies that may at first glance look like ordinary blockbusters, like Deadpool & Wolverine, a colossal success by even pre-pandemic standards and indeed a real-terms best performance for the 25-year old X-Men/Deadpool universe.

None of this bodes well for the current plans for "Bond 26," which going by everything said about it is intended to be another big-budgeted tentpole aimed at a general audience of exactly the kind failing to pay off, all as this particular franchise looks especially chancy given the increasingly exhausted look of the "spy-fi" genre (consider the decline of the Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises), all as Bond appears even more vulnerable than 007 these days.

No comparable franchise has leaned so heavily on nostalgia for so long as this one has (falling back on it to help prop up a reboot whose runners initially tried to cut their links with the original series, from Skyfall forward), while it was painfully apparent from the audience response to No Time to Die that the young had pretty much long since lost interest in that particular hero, a fact that contributed to the movie's having the lowest real-terms North American gross of a Bond movie since Licence to Kill way back in 1989. (Indeed, it seems fair to say that while the reboot undeniably pleased a lot of critics and made a lot of money, where that important measure for a neverending franchise that is winning a new generation to the character is concerned it has to be regarded as a failure, and a predictable one given that where it wasn't running on nostalgia it was running on borrowed ideas.) The result is that when 2028 rolls around very few of those in the two "24 and under" quadrants are likely to have any personal recollection of seeing a Bond movie in an actual theater, with all that implies for any appeal based on prior attachment. Meanwhile it is hard to picture anything making this figure, way back in 1962 already an update of what was in 1953 an update of the already then very stale stuff of Duckworth Drew and Bulldog Drummond, "relevant" today, even the route of self-awareness and self-parody that, for example, worked so well for 2024's Deadpool movie long since exhausted here, nowhere left to go with the big screen spy parody, or even parody of this particular spy (whose adventures had their touch of parody from the start, with Charles Feldman already having Peter Sellers essay the role way back in 1967).

Indeed, the extreme challenge of making a Bond movie salable now on the scale that it needs to be in today's saturated yet contracting market--something M. Bezos might have considered before plunking down so much money for control of the franchise, but hey, why actually think in an age in which Ms. Bernanke, Yellen and Powell decided that speculators and other asset-mongers should have free money forever, the cost to everyone else be damned--is probably why even with the project supposedly underway for half a year, with two prominent producers (Amy Pascal, David Heyman) and a Big Name director (Denis Villeneuve) attached, we have yet to see made public the slightest hint of anything resembling an actual idea as to what they all mean to do with the franchise that will let them deliver the hit the real-life would-be world-controlling billionaire with his own personal space program expects. (The combination of cacophonous noise with the utter lack of signal in fact seems to have had talk of the much smaller event of a new Bond video game "trending" online to a degree it would ordinarily not have done because between the contentless publicity for the film and the cynical copy of the articles about the game they were made to think the Bond of Bond: First Light had actually been cast as the Bond of "Bond 26.") My guess: rather than holding back until the time is right to deliver a big and brilliant surprise Ms. Pascal of Sony e-mail leak fame, Mr. Villeneuve and company are going to give us more pretentious, downbeat, James Bond. In the process this will likely only underline how unbelievably tired the game of making not just Bond movies but shamelessly milking any and every franchise out there has become as, befitting an epoch of rentier dominion, those defending the decision point to "back catalog value" as offering at least a silver lining to the big dark cloud that will hang over the series runners when the receipts are in.