Transition points

Amazon now controls the future of James Bond, and it's worth looking at how franchises can end up turning out bland products if they aren't careful

Photo by Lance Anderson / Unsplash

Two big stories hit the entertainment world in the last couple of weeks: Amazon-owned MGM studios acquired the creative rights to the James Bond franchise, while another report claimed that Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy was planning on stepping down at the end of 2025. Kennedy has since pushed back against that report in an interview with Deadline.

The first story feels like a huge sea change on par with news that George Lucas was selling sold Lucasfilm to Disney. For more than 60 years and 25 movies, James Bond has been an institution in Hollywood, a classic hero that has evolved throughout the cold war and defined the spy genre for generations of moviegoers. The franchise has been tightly controlled by the Broccoli family through their holding company Danjaq.

Each Bond film is an event: a career-defining role for the title role (and for most of the cast), and throughout the years, the family has taken their time to hone the story, action, and drama.

Amazon acquired MGM back in 2021, and its motivations were pretty clear from the onset: acquire the studio's vast catalog of films and television shows, which included the likes of not only the Bond series, but also franchises like Stargate. This was at the height of the streaming wars, where every media company was trying to attract as many subscribers to their rosters as possible, and one way to do that was to make sure that you had lots to offer them.

While Amazon had the distribution rights to the Bond films, the Broccolis had been able to hold onto the creative side. Nobody was going to make a film without them, and we haven't seen a film since 2021's No Time To Die, Daniel Craig's final appearance as Bond. In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that the relationship between the Broccoli family and Amazon had fallen apart, with Amazon frustrated at the slow pace of development for a new film, and with Barbara Broccoli irritated at the studio's plans and algorithmic approach to the point where she apparently said "these people are fucking idiots."

A key point of contention was Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke referring their work as "content" and their intent to produce a range of spinoff projects that would essentially transform the series into a larger media franchise like Disney has done with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The New Yorker summed this up nicely with a cartoon from Ellis Rosen:

It's certainly a concern, and there are plenty of filmmakers and critics who've opined about the way franchises and cinematic universes have taken over Hollywood. It's not always smooth sailing, and I don't think that we can point to the series as something that's knocked every single hit out of the park. As my dad (our family's resident Bond expert) pointed out, "it's been a good run [but] there were times it stunk." But there's still something that feels special and unique about the Bond films, and it's a vestige of Hollywood that seems to be vanishing.

Lucasfilm was another one of those shops that really felt different: George Lucas made his six little indie space films, as well as the Indiana Jones series, Willow, and American Graffiti, while Disney announced its plans to release a ton of new films, kicking off its spree with The Force Awakens and following it up with three additional films, two standalones, and a whole bunch of television projects, as well as a whole list of other films that they're hoping to make.

All of that recent activity has been under Kathleen Kennedy's leadership, and on paper, it's been an enormous success: all of those films have earned a lot of money for Disney, even as there's been a string of problems along the way when it comes to story. Like Bond, there's been some bright points (The Last Jedi, Rogue One, Andor, The Mandalorian), and some duds (Rise of Skywalker, Book of Boba Fett), which is what you'll have when you start to churn out material.

This isn't exactly a new thing with Star Wars: the franchise is synonymous with branding and merchandizing, and over the course of the 1991s, Lucasfilm was happy to provide fans with a flood of stories that continued the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo. Some where excellent, some weren't.

Kennedy in particular has become something of a boogieman for the idiot YouTuber demographic, who've been predicting for years that she's about to be forced out of a job because she's ruined the story for any number of unlikely reasons. She's had the unenviable job of continuing Lucas's story while balancing Disney's desire for as many additional films and stories that they can turn out – she talks specifically and clearly about the work that she's done:

"You’re trying to look forward. And at the same time, you’re trying to create stories that feel familiar. So you’re moving into the future, but you’re maintaining a sense of familiarity. I think that’s the hardest balance."

While the Star Wars brand has been doing well under Kennedy's tenure, there are plenty of actual missteps that Lucasfilm has made over the years. Chief amongst them is not going into the sequel trilogy with a plan, and now that episodes 7, 8 and 9 are done, figuring out what direction to take Star Wars. This wasn't an easy job: Kennedy had to resurrect the brand after its punishing reaction to the prequel trilogy. The Force Awakens had to simultaneously reintroduce audiences to the story and take it in a new direction, and it fulfilled that job nicely. But The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker had to fill out the story started in episode 7 and both the prequel and original trilogies.

They didn't really do that, because Lucasfilm didn't really go into the project with a plan: Rian Johnson was given free range to take the story in whatever direction he wanted, and J.J. Abrams had to go from there to cap it all off. My impression is that this came down to a lot of improvisation: director Colin Trevorrow had dropped out late in the game and Abrams came in to come up with something.

At the same time, both Rogue One and Solo were thrown into the mix to hit theaters between those saga films, and each had their own production issues, and they were both films that didn't really do anything new with the franchise: they were backfilling story without really changing what we fundamentally knew about their characters or the situations they set up. Neither are bad films: Rogue One is really excellent, and Solo is a lot of fun.

The only film that really pushed the envelop was The Last Jedi, in which Johnson really sought to upend the tropes and conventions of Star Wars by pushing audiences to rethink about the films in new ways.

I've grown to love it and what he was trying to do, but a lot of fans didn't, and when you're a media company looking to cash in on a profitable franchise, you don't want to leave fans with something that they don't enjoy. The backlash has been loud and obnoxious, with Kennedy at the center: she's blamed for any misstep, and word of her departure seemed to fulfill what YouTubers have been prophesizing: that she was about to be forced out for her sins.

Kennedy pushed back against that original report, saying that she's going to die making movies, but that they have been thinking of a succession plan: more power to her.

Both of these stories dovetail in one place for me: we've reached a tipping point from where you have a creative enterprise that's been pushed from creating art into products.

There's an interesting line when it comes to commercial art. Star Wars is patently a merchandizing machine, and James Bond has been running for decades. These are films that make a lot of money, but I also see them as projects with a lot of creative intent behind them. The original and prequel Star Wars trilogies are famously independent films because Lucas wanted a lot of creative control. Love them or hate them, the Prequels are the stories that he wanted to tell in the way that he wanted to tell them.

As studios have consolidated and a small handful of media companies have begun to gobble up studios and talent, the entire film industry has reoriented itself around the factory-like output that we see with the enormous franchises like Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Star Trek, and others, with little space for the smaller stories that have to exist between them. Those franchises can tell good stories: Andor is one of the best Star Wars stories to date (you have no idea how excited I am for the second season), and films and shows like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Daredevil, Black Panther, or Wonder Woman can tell compelling stories with compelling characters. But there's still that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that these are stories that have been constructed into existence because a financial report for investors dictates that it must exist.

That artificialness feels like it's growing more apparent in these larger franchises. Films like Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, and Captain America: Brave New World (I haven't seen this one yet, but reviews haven't been great), Star Trek: Section 31, The Flash, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Rise of Skywalker are all just kind of ... forgettable.

Some of this is down to how they're filmed: MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Gavin Edwards, Dave Gonzales, and Joanna Robinson provides a good window into how these films are essentially mad to formula and constructed on the fly, leading to issues with VFX, costly reshoots, and massive changes, while in other cases, they're projects that are designed to fit into a larger story that just keeps going. HBO's recent series The Franchise was a fun satire on this entire industry is just people holding their place until they can move onto something else.

The notable entries in these long-running franchises are the ones where the studios empower their creators to work to their best. James Gunn's Marvel and DC films really stand out, while Johnson's The Last Jedi and Tony Gilroy's Andor really feels like the only entries in the Disney era that did anything to push Star Wars in a meaningful direction. But even when you're hiring creative people, it's not a silver bullet: there's been plenty of talk about how young, promising directors are hired by these studios only to have their talents winnowed down to bland compromises. Look at how different Taika Waititi's two Thor films are.

The technological revolution that social media and streaming has brought gives companies and studios plenty of insights into what audiences are watching, and what their preferences are. Netflix and other streamers famously churn through as much data as they can hoover up to understand what their audiences want, and have used those metrics as tools to develop their stories: House of Cards was famously identified as a series for the streaming service to produce because the data suggested it would be popular with their users. And as studios create new shows, those audience preferences loom over them. The Mandalorian succeeded because it takes the franchise to some familiar-but-different ground that fans were looking for, while shows that really struck out to to tell a different story, like The Acolyte were hounded by fans who didn't want to have their view of the world challenged or questioned.

As a population, fans enjoy what they've seen, and their viewing habits and behaviors will reinforce the types of stories that they want to see, and they don't really like changes. We want the familiar formulas that come with the classic Star Trek or Next Generation or Stargate SG-1 episodes. A vocal component of the Star Wars fandom didn't want Luke to turn his back on being a Jedi, or for someone else to take up the mantle and complained. Fans didn't like George Lucas's vision for what the story for the prequel trilogy would be and complained. Readers thought that Frank Herbert wrote Paul Atreides to be the hero of Dune, to the point where he ended up writing a followup that hammered the point home even further. (I can't wait for Dune 3 to hit theaters and to see what reactions will be like.)

Fans have been complaining about some of these stories: an argument that I frequently see is that they're boring, or that they're just not interesting, and there are elements of truth to that: there's a lot of potential for entertainment products to be boring! But what's ironic is that as the architects of these franchises do try and change things up by updating or modernizing elements of them, they're hit with "they're not sticking to the lore!" which seems to be the new buzzword from the YouTube contingent right now.

Where I'm going with this entire rant is that by and large, fans desire comfort from the stories they're fans of. They'll be attracted to creative and unique and well-executed stories, but as soon as there's a demand for more of that type of story, they'll be happy with the products that the authors, companies, and studios, turn out for them. This isn't always a bad thing: you can have good products. But the longer this runs, your chances of having a so-so products tossed out into the mix rises. And then another and another, until it's rare that one of those great ones comes along.

I've had commenters tell me that studios and directors and writers should be listening to the fans because they're the ones that are ultimately footing the bill, but I think creators need to do the opposite: put fan desires aside when they're embarking on telling these stories, and figure out what the story requires. Tell a good story, and people will find it. The more we go down these paths of fan service and inserting references and recycling the same backgrounds and planets and ships and characters, and there's less that delights and amazes us, because they rarely meet the expectations that we set up for ourselves.

We can always go back and rewatch the films that we love to see the characters as they are, or write fanfiction to play out the scenarios that we'd love to see. But talented, creative people can lead us to new delights and destinations. That is where this franchise studio model has let us down, with a long string of films that leans on nostalgia and familiar scenes, while rarely advancing the world or challenging out conceptions of it.

This brings us all the way back to Bond, and Amazon's seemingly expansive plans for a lot more of him. Now that Amazon has taken over creative control of the franchise, it's got the infrastructure to begin turning out new Bond films, TV shows, streaming specials, and tie-in whatevers to an audience and fan base that wants to see more shaken-not-stirred martinis, gadgets, action scenes, and implied sex scenes between the A-listers they pick for Bond and his latest female friend. I'd love to see a Bond that pushes the boundaries of the spy genre – much like the Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy films did before Daniel Craig's tenure reinvented the franchise. What would Bond look like in the world of 2025, influenced by the war on terror and the growing global domination of China and removed from the trappings of the Cold War that defined those earlier entries? Would Amazon dare update or transform to see where they can take it?

Probably not. Amazon will no doubt pay attention to the legacy of the franchise and move forward carefully with its next first couple of films, all while building out a larger and grander story that won't push the boundaries too much. Much as Star Wars feels like it's become a stream of content, the future of James Bond feels like it could be headed in much the same direction.

Hopefully, as audience fatigue builds and the endless box office expansion stagnates, it'll force studios to take a step back and really take a look at the stories that they've been telling.

I've been happy to see that Kennedy talk about how they are working on approaching the future of the franchise, with some new films that'll take place in the post-sequel trilogy era. Hopefully, she'll be able to position the studio in such a way that they can walk that fine line of content and stories that continue to push and expand what Star Wars can be, because that purpose and desire to explore this story is what will keep it going long into the future to delight audiences like the first films did when they were released.

Currently reading

I usually have a small stack of books that I'm working through, but at the moment, I've had one that I've been working my way through: Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author. This is a really interesting book, and as I've spent a good chunk of time ranting about creative art vs. products, Okorafor is an author that I've been drawn to when I think about raw creative vision.

It's an interesting book so far (I'm almost done) that deals a lot with telling stories that are true to one's self and vision, alongside a compelling family drama that stretches between the United States and Nigeria. It's been an interesting ride, and I'll likely jot down some thoughts about it when I finish it.

Other books on the to-read list? Samantha Harvey's Orbital, which earned the Booker Prize last year, which I'm enjoying. After that? I'm not totally sure: probably Alexander Freed's new Star Wars novel The Mask of Fear.

Currently reading

Further reading