There’s a time in every franchise where they fall into a rut and need to do something to get out of it. For many, the solution has been to reboot; whether hard or soft, these restarts are meant to get the audience and property back on the same page, but can easily lead to a stagnation of its own that’s as frustrating as it is invigorating.
One of the bigger victims of this phenomenon is arguably the James Bond franchise. Ian Fleming’s iconic super spy has spent 20 years learning to become the classic version fans love, starting with 2006’s Casino Royale. To give the property a full-on restart, original IP owners Eon looked at Batman Begins’ approach to dark and gritty realism and an emphasis on practical stunt work for inspiration, creating a young Bond that was no stranger to secretly serving Her Majesty, but still had some tricks to learn. As surprising as it was to hear back then, Eon thought this was necessary for the good of the franchise, and it’s a gamble that paid off spectacularly. Mostly.
Yes, Casino Royale introduced the world to Daniel Craig and convinced studios that reboots were the new hotness. But it also did its job a bit too well, putting Bond in a state where he’s never quite left the reboot mindset. 2012’s Skyfall functions as a soft reboot by adding in classic 007 fixtures missing from the prior two films like his supporting cast. (Q, Moneypenny, and a male M all debut here and recur going forward.) And both Skyfall and Craig’s last, No Time to Die, see Bond rebooting himself within those films, working throughout them to get his groove back after he’s spent a different amount of years in retirement.
The now viral “Surf Dracula” tweet poking fun at modern storytelling almost applies to Craig’s Bond movies. While the post-Casino sequels don’t drag out Bond’s story like a prestige show, there’s some admitted tedium that makes the whole run uneven and spoil some of the goodwill earned. This is a fascinatingly messy set of movies, where the frequent restarts as are part of the era’s DNA as their habit of imitating fellow blockbusters like Batman or Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Despite that, and the more mixed reception to Quantum of Solace and Spectre, these films were generally safe from any major fan blowback that can’t be separated from the current franchise age. Spectre making Ernst Stavro Blofeld into Bond’s brother is dumb, but it barely registers as controversial when placed alongside Zack Snyder’s Superman tenure or either of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek or Wars-related decisions.
Of course, James Bond has a leg up on other franchises in that it has a built-in fix for its any poorly received decisions. Having a new actor on a regular basis creates a loop of soft reboots, with each man creating a new mini-continuity that can stand on its own and theoretically tie to the prior star’s run. And if there’s a lousy Bond, oh well, he’ll either get better or just swapped out eventually. This self-correcting method a defining feature of the franchise…but then, Craig’s Bond went and found time to very definitively die, leaving things in an awkward (and admittedly funny) position. So how do Bond’s stewards forge ahead? Apparently by giving audiences not one, but two new Bonds in relative proximity to each other.
Amazon’s currently hunting for a new actor to grace the big screen, but it’ll be preceded by 007 First Light. Developed by IO Interactive and out this week, the game has its own young Bond played by Patrick Gibson and stands in its own continuity the studio hopes can expand to a trilogy. While IO’s drawing more from Fleming’s books and short stories, it’s still in conversation with the films, to the point First Light has an opening title sequence featuring a Lana Del Rey single and text that declares Gibson as the man playing Fleming’s creation.
Between First Light and Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming movie, there’ll undoubtedly be overlap between the two and how they go about rebooting James Bond. What’ll make all this interesting isn’t just whether or not Amazon opts to unify the two projects, a la Tomb Raider, but how the game and film bounce off one another. What will they say about Bond’s current cyclical nature, and will they have it in them to try and push the character and property forward under new stewards without such historical baggage weighing them down?
We’ll find out when 007 First Light comes out May 27 for PC and current-gen consoles (with a Nintendo Switch 2 release later this year), followed by Denis Villeneuve’s Bond movie in the near future.
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