Looking Down The Barrel: What’s The Future For The James Bond Franchise?

Spoiler alert: James Bond Will Return.

No Time To Die ends with the same promise that has appeared on every Bond film credit roll since Goldfinger, even though it’s been well established that Daniel Craig’s run has come to an end. And while I’m not here to review that movie, I will say that I really liked it. I’m a massive fan of Casino Royale (I wrote a three–part piece on my love for Casino Royale, way back in 2016), but I was disappointed to see the three subsequent films serve as a collective treatise on Why It Really Sucks To Be James Bond. After seeing No Time To Die, I’m filled with relief that Craig’s final outing somehow managed to salvage the Joy of 007. Yes, it has angst and heartbreak to spare, but it’s also a hell of a fun watch.

More broadly, the success of No Time To Die, even in the face of a worldwide pandemic, serves as a reminder that the franchise is malleable. It’s easy to see the world of Bond as impossibly straitjacketed by tropes and traditions, but the actual films and their producers (the Broccoli family, who are at least as creatively hands-on as Kevin Feige is with the MCU) have long demonstrated a greater breadth of vision — and that breadth is never more evident than when it’s time to pass the torch to a new Bond actor.

When Sean Connery left for the first time, the result was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the franchise’s first real love story (and the closest adherent to its source novel). The arrival of Roger Moore swung the films into the world of broad lapels and broader humor; thankfully, by the time he was scrap-metal-snowboarding to a bad cover of “California Girls,” the producers were ready to get more grounded with Timothy Dalton. GoldenEye and Pierce Brosnan launched 007 into the ‘90s, complete with Judi Dench’s M calling him a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” (a great line, even if it was writing a check that none of those films could actually cash). And finally, there was Daniel Craig, diving into that gritty mid-aughts sea of Jason Bournes and Jack Bauers with a 1953 novel on his belt and somehow emerging as the coolest cat on the block.

The next leap forward has the potential to bring about just as big a change as any of these — but what will that change look like? Summing up the paragraph above, I’d argue that each new era of Bond films has been a mixture of “embracing the zeitgeist” and “restoring the vintage 007” — and therefore, the future must lie somewhere between those goalposts.

The “zeitgeist” bit is tough to nail down, knowing how fast things are changing on the entertainment landscape and how much more they might have changed by the time the next Bond film drops. In terms of spy-thriller competitors, there’s not really a new brass ring to chase — 007’s chief cinematic competitor, the Mission: Impossible series, now feels tonally similar enough to the current Bond flicks that you could imagine them occurring in the same universe. On TV, The Americans, Killing Eve, and The Night Manager have also trafficked in similar territory to the recent Bond films, emphasizing the gritty and humanistic aspects of tradecraft (though they tend to probe character more deeply, and explode less often, thanks to television’s greater length and smaller budgets).

There is, however, one recent successful spy thriller that genuinely has gone in a different direction: Kingsman: The Secret Service. Directed and co-written by Matthew Vaughn (whose debut film Layer Cake arguably served as Daniel Craig’s 007 audition), Kingsman drew liberally from the over-the-top Bond tropes of old — impossible gadgets, doomsday machines — to deliver one of the best action-film romps of all time. The movie was a breath of fresh air amid the maudlin latter-day Bond films, and its own hero knew it: “Nowadays they’re all a bit too serious for my taste,” says Colin Firth’s Harry Hart when discussing spy films. “But give me a far-fetched theatrical plot any day.”

No Time To Die often heeds those words, delivering the kind of pleasurable escapism we haven’t seen from these movies in quite some time. If this isn’t an outright promise that the series is ready to pivot in a lighter direction, it’s at least solid proof that the movies can go that way without ditching reality (an important qualifier for a series that has left us with traumas like Diamonds Are Forever, Moonraker, and nuclear physicists named Christmas Jones). Some of the credit for this tonal adjustment surely goes to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a late addition to No Time To Die’s writing team who was hand-picked by no less than Craig himself to inject some levity and balance out the film’s gender dynamics. It’s exciting to imagine what Waller-Bridge could do if she were given free rein to draft a Bond epic from scratch; I’d bet that she could deliver something in the vein of The Spy Who Loved Me (to me, the platonic ideal of the Ludicrous Age of 007) without going fully over the top and down the other side.

Bringing on a non-male writer is a small step in the right direction, but it’s not nearly enough to bring the series up to date in terms of diversity — which, if we’re talking about capturing the zeitgeist, has to be a huge priority. On this front, the franchise’s biggest albatross is Bond himself. For longer than I’ve been alive, the producers have tried various schemes to balance out the reality of a hero who’s so white and so male that he practically bleeds powdered wigs. No Time To Die has one of the most diverse supporting casts yet — and is directed by the franchise’s first Asian filmmaker, Cary Joji Fukunaga — but when Daniel Craig’s departure wipes the whole slate clean, the world’s eyes will be pointed at one face and one face only: that of the next 007. If the producers pass the martini glass to yet another white cis man, then they should expect a mixture of backlash and disinterested shrugs: hardly the foundation on which to build another five or six hit films.

On the other hand, a genuinely fresh face could marshal the next generation of Bond fans. Rége-Jean Page and Henry Golding, two non-white names recently bandied about by Those Who Speculate, have elicited big cheers from the kinds of people who aren’t generally first in line for Bond flicks. I doubt either of them will end up in the role, because in another few years they’ll probably both be too famous and thus too expensive (and also because nobody in history has correctly predicted the next 007), but I hope Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson have taken notice of the kind of excitement that’s generated when people see meaningful change on the horizon. And let’s be clear, it wouldn’t even be that big a change — we’re still talking about cis-het men who won every genetic lottery.

If the producers truly want to shake things up, they could try challenging some deeper preconceptions about the character, like sexuality and gender identity. No Time To Die certainly feints in this direction by casting Lashana Lynch as a proper Double-0, but the film just has too many plates in the air to flesh her character out significantly. (Yet another reason to be mad at SPECTRE for loading the series down with even more continuity-baggage than it already had.) It’s tempting to imagine Lynch stepping up as the new series lead going forward — especially since No Time To Die‘s script takes pains to point out that “James Bond” and “007” don’t have to be one and the same — except the end credits don’t say “007 Will Return”; they say “James Bond Will Return.” (Technically, Lynch could remain as 007 while the new James Bond becomes more of a secondary character, but that seems highly unlikely.)

Now, it’s true that Barbara Broccoli has already said point-blank that she doesn’t want a female James Bond, in part because she feels that doing so would be a “gimmick.” Leaving aside that (a) the entire franchise is built on gimmicks and (b) Broccoli’s father once offered the tuxedo to Burt Reynolds and (c) George Lazenby kicked off his one-film stint by saying, “This never happened to the other fellow!”… I just disagree with her premise. It’s only a gimmick if it’s treated that way — if, say, other characters react to a non-male Bond in the manner of an elderly man in the ‘40s learning that his doctor is a woman. But if Bond can just be Bond, regardless of any particular chromosomal identifiers, there shouldn’t be anything to fear, other than the same mental adjustments every audience needs to make when someone new steps into the role. (If anyone does want to raise a stink, they can go play in Ben Shapiro’s sandbox.)

So what about that second goalpost I mentioned — the part about restoring the vintage 007? Well, I’d say that the essence of Bond was perfectly laid out way back in 1954, in Ian Fleming’s opening sentence of Live and Let Die: “There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent.” A half-century later, that’s still what we want to see: a bad-ass spy who gets to live the high life in between kills. We want to step into a cooler world than our own. Once upon a time, that meant a world with a martini in every glass and an Aston Martin in every garage. In 2021, for a whole lot of people, it also means a world in which sexism and racism aren’t such high barriers. If Broccoli and Wilson can see their way to opening the wish-fulfillment doors a little wider, there’s every reason to believe that creative and financial success will follow — just as it has when they’ve taken intriguing risks in the past.

Nick Rheinwald-Jones is Co-Artistic Director of Spy Brunch LLC, a Los Angeles immersive theatre company. He has written about film and TV for Decider and Previously.TV, and is a frequent guest on the pop-culture podcast Extra Hot Great.

Where to stream No Time To Die