I'm not "confident" Amazon will do right by Bond. But you said "With Amazon, you can be sure there will be radical changes..." We cannot be sure there will be radical changes. I've given an example where they did not make radical changes to source material. We shall see.
But I will say this, I don't trust Barbara Broccoli any more than I trust Amazon.
I just watched the trailer for Reacher season 3 from Amazon Prime. Looks legit to me and true to Lee Child's Jack Reacher. Amazon doesn't screw up every property they acquire.
The two movies were 100% kickass. Many of the book fans couldn't get past Reacher's height, which for the uninitiated is 6'5" in the books. So Tom Cruise isn't exactly the right actor for the job. And I get that. But the stories were excellent.
I thought the second one was a bit weak, but the first film is fantastic. It has a real 1970s Hollywood thriller vibe, like a Dirty Harry movie, and is terrific stuff.
I think it kind of compares to the Bond casting conversation, because there's always calls that the actor should be exactly as Fleming described; but I've seen Tom Cruise play Reacher, and I've seen a large man play Reacher, and I know Reacher is large in the books, but for me Tom Cruise was much better because he's one of the best movie stars ever and gave the better performance. The other guy is indeed large, but that didn't change anything about the character for me- he still did the same things, and there's no difference other than a lot of scenes opening with other characters saying "oh you're large". Once you're beyond that you have a middling actor who's not as good as Tom Cruise.
I get that if you've read the books apparently his largeness is somehow key, but that didn't really come across in the three-quarters or so of a series I made it though (before I got bored of them travelling between half a dozen boring houses and asking questions over and over again).
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,217Chief of Staff
If you enjoyed them, then good. The first is passable, the second is poor…the stories are good, just executed poorly…no wonder Lee Child didn’t want Cruise anywhere near Reacher…
I can't see any interviews where he expressed that view: it's mostly that he said the fans felt his size was too important. I think the point he makes in this interview is good:
However, he said that it was “interesting” that those who hadn’t read his books “really liked those movies” as “they were kind of convinced by Cruise”.
The first film is absolutely terrific; no idea why you think it's executed poorly- maybe take it on its own terms rather than worry about how close it is to the book. I can find Moonraker to be enormous fun and not worry too much that it's not exactly a perfect representation of Fleming's novel.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,217Chief of Staff
Lee Child actively tried to keep Cruise away from Reacher…Cruise ended up using a third party and a BIG check…once Child saw it was going to happen anyway, he changed his tune…
If you like very formulaic movies - go ahead…it’s not particularly scripted well…but if you like that sort of thing 🤷🏻♂️
I've seen no evidence for your claim about Child, if it's out there: fine, I can't claim to be invested in Reacher lore, but nothing I've seen has supported your claim and you haven't backed it up, so I've no reason to believe it just yet.
It's a very well-made and quite stylish thriller, much better than the Amazon series, which is boring. The film is written by one of the best blockbuster scriptwriters in the business- the way it deals with the sniper's identity (which I believe is hidden in the book from the outset but obviously can't be in a movie) is very clever indeed. The show is formulaic without the style, flair or charismatic central performance. Maybe the books are just formulaic, they seem it as far as I can tell.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,217Chief of Staff
It’s not my fault you have “seen no evidence” - go and do a proper search…I’m not here to spoon feed you.
Believe it or don’t - I don’t care.
The Amazon series is FAR superior…if you haven’t got the attention span to watch it - don’t.
I don't understand why you're trying to make this so aggressive and personal: you feel you have to try and insinuate there's something wrong with me (I like 'formulaic' stuff, I haven't 'got the attention span' etc.) because I like a film or don't like a show, it's a very underhand way of debating about a bit of media and seems unnecessarily designed to try and raise the temperature of a conversation and turn it into an argument. I don't get why you feel the need to do that.
If you think the series is superior I'm happy to consider any viewpoints you have on it. I think the film is a top bit of pulpy fun because of the elements I mentioned (the 70s thriller Dirty Harry-ish style, the clever writing, the good direction, the charismatic star etc.), and I found the series dull because it had none of the panache of the film and felt very by-the-numbers, and together with a repetitive investigation where they just went backwards and forwards between the same few places strung out over many episodes, it failed to keep my interest. Much like the second film, which I guess didn't bore me but I felt had the same slightly cheesy source material without that extra something the first movie had. If you do something as trite and old hat as a mysterious, hard-as-nails drifter character, you've got to do it really well to lift it.
We could all insult each as much as we like to claim there's some deficiency in one another because we liked or disliked things which we all feel differently about, but that would make any forum unbearable to take part in. If you want an argument (about Jack Reacher of all things!) you can have it on your own.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,217Chief of Staff
I’m not making anything personal or aggressive…that’s your MO…I probably still have an PM from you calling me all sorts of stuff…and quite a few complaints about you…I always find it strange that you start niggling at people and then try and claim the high ground 🤷🏻♂️ send me another PM if you like…but lets leave this here…
I'm happy to chat on PM if you want but please don't accuse me of 'calling you all sorts of stuff' on a thread for others to read - that didn't happen.
I can’t imagine any Jack Reacher book fans (I am one) thinking the movies are a good representation. The stories are understandably edited down and suffer for that, and the second one, in particular, is far removed from the novel. Tom Cruise is totally wrong for the role. If you take the two movies as a man called Jack Reacher (nothing to do with the book character) then they are perfectly adequate thrillers. I do not get the Dirty Harry comparison, it’s totally different in style.
The Amazon series is terrific. Very close to the books. The 8-episode format lends itself to the more detailed adaption of the books. I like a slower pace so the complexities of the plot can be developed properly. Alan Ritchson is as good a match for the book Reacher as could possibly be, he brings the character to life, his acting is perfectly good for the role. The series format is perfect for the Reacher books which are detailed and complex, something that is not possible to convey in a 2 hour movie.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,217Chief of Staff
I think yeah, having not read the books I see them as good thrillers (or the first one anyway), as I say above: I'm not too worried about how close they are to the books as I'm coming to them as films. I totally get that fans of the books would be annoyed at his lack of largeness as it seems a defining character trait: I guess it's not unlike a Batman adaptation having the main character not dressing up as a bat. And they are very popular books so obviously they're good at what they do. But as it is I think the film is effective without it, and comparing the series and film the character's traits seemed very close in the two to me.
I think it's absolutely got the 70s thriller style to it though, I guess even down to the car Reacher ends up driving about. And the opening sniper sequence is very evocative of the Scorpio sequences from DH, that slow lingering style. I went back and checked out some reviews and I can see I'm not the first to say it (and most reviews are very positive- I even found the Reacher subreddit and surprisingly even some of the fans there say the movies are better: opinion is more divided than I expected). Even the main characters of Jack and Harry are hardly too different in their approach and outlook, I think it works very well.
I guess as we're talking about it from the point of Amazon doing source material well, I'd have to say that I found their Jack Ryan pretty disappointing overall although fairly watchable fluff. He got turned into a special forces superhero, which didn't feel right for Ryan to me- I know he had a backstory of the marines in the books, but they really leant on that a lot with him leading all of these special missions in full military fatigues all the time.
JACK REACHER is pretty great. I have no dog to kick with Cruise not being the book character's size...it's a film, and it's a very well executed film at that.
JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK is the film that we all feared the first film would be. Flat out terrible.
I like the new REACHER series. It's a different dynamic than the films so it feels like its own thing. On a level of delivery, it feels akin to the first film in terms of overall quality, so I'm satisfied.
I think the first Reacher movie worked very well. Cruise was good in it in spite of his size. To put it another way: His size worked against him, but Cruise's skill and star power made it work anyway.
1. Goldfinger 2. Skyfall 3. Goldeneye 4. The Spy Who Loved Me 5. OHMSS
Check out my Instagram: @livingthebondlife
"I never joke about my work, 007."
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,940MI6 Agent
I thought this recent article retrieved from my Times subscription might be suitable for inclusion here:
What’s gone wrong with James Bond? No star, no script, no plan
It has been ten years since Daniel Craig said he was done with 007 — and three since he died on screen. Jonathan Dean investigates how Bond HQ lost the plot
Shaken or stirring: is there life left in the old spy?
Jonathan Dean
Sunday January 26 2025, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
There was a stunned hush at the Royal Albert Hall on September 28, 2021, as the closing credits rolled on the world premiere of No Time to Die. Fans and royal guests, including Prince Charles, took stock: their hero had just been blown to smithereens. He was dead. Was that it? No more martinis for Mr Bond?
The panic, though, was short-lived, as the final words on screen announced: “James Bond will return.” But the questions soon started buzzing. When and how would 007 rise again, and who would it be? James Bond is dead! Long live James Bond?
No Time to Die hit cinemas almost three and a half years ago. There have been three prime ministers since then, and that prince is now King Charles. But there is still no new 007 —only a simmering national debate as we await the seventh Bond, seemingly no closer to finding the right man to replace Daniel Craig.
In truth, the quest for a new Bond has been running for a decade, ever since Craig said — on promo duties for Spectre in 2015 — that he would rather “slash my wrists” than play the spy again. He returned for No Time to Die but walked off set for the last time in 2019. Like Blofeld’s bomb, time is now ticking on Britain’s biggest movie export, as once-mooted replacements such as Idris Elba grow too old and industry sages begin to wonder if our restless pop culture has simply moved on.
Bond has never been in such a fine mess — much of it because of a seismic business deal that set the franchise’s wizened guardians up against the latest brash kid on the block. In 2021 Amazon bought MGM for $8.45 billion, acquiring MGM’s financial stake in the James Bond franchise through its partnership with Eon Productions.
Amazon’s executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, the man with the golden everything, is not the brains most people wanted in charge — “We can develop that IP for the 21st century,” he declared of 007 — but there was one detail about the deal that Bond fans clung to. Despite Amazon’s purchase, the contract stated that the Eon supremos Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson would retain creative control. Theirs was a historic company deeply invested in the big screen — except now they were working with the same streamer you bought your lawnmower off. What could possibly go wrong?
I have met Broccoli on numerous occasions and she was always friendly, if steely and not afraid to be blunt. So when, at the end of 2021, I asked what the Amazon deal meant for Bond, she was not exactly effusive. “The truth is we don’t know,” she said. “We are not really any more enlightened about how we fit in.”
And how is that relationship going now? “These people are f***ing idiots,” an exasperated Broccoli told friends last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Or, as her father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, once said: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”
Barbara Broccoli, 64, bleeds Bond. Her father passed her the reins when he died in 1996, but she had been working in some capacity on the franchise since The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977.
“Barbara is the perfect captain,” says Mark O’Connell, a Bond scholar and the author of Catching Bullets: Memoirs of a Bond Fan. “A lot of fans say her father would be rolling in his grave over what they did to Bond, but no — he’d actually be dancing a jig.” The most successful Bond films of all time at the box office, clocking up ten Oscar nominations, have starred Craig. “But the flip side is, where do they go now?”
The spy series has been here before. A combination of financial pressures, a change of lead and questions about Bond’s place in a post-Soviet world meant there were six years, four months and ten days between 1989’s Licence to Kill (Timothy Dalton’s curtain call) and 1995’s GoldenEye (the first to feature Pierce Brosnan). That is, as yet, the longest gap between Bond films.
The next Bond will have to be released by February 2028 to avoid taking that unwanted record. Yet such a time frame seems optimistic.The industry consensus is that we will be waiting another three years at least. Of course, the producers need a script, a director and an actor. But according to Ajay Chowdhury, a film industry lawyer and a co-author of Spy Octane: The Vehicles of James Bond, the immediate and most difficult task is the labyrinth of existing deals, involving MGM, Amazon, Universal and United Artists, that must be negotiated before anyone can slip on 007’s dinner jacket.
“The Bond franchise is like a plot of land and Amazon is still building the foundations,” Chowdhury says. “Casting a star is as far off as choosing curtains.” Since the last Bond, he explains, the business of cinema has changed. “Covid means movies make less money at cinemas now, so any Bond film needs to be budgeted accordingly. It’s unsexy, but right now they’re working out the back-end deal.”
That recalibration may even mean a shift away from Pinewood to filming abroad — anything to reduce the cost of building expensive semi-permanent sets.
Adding to the delay is the struggling blockbuster business. Seemingly sure-fire hits such as the Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones sequels have all floundered at the box office. The last lost an estimated $143 million. “There is a real pause in confidence on big films,” O’Connell says. “And that filters down to Bond.”
The average blockbuster costs at least $250 million to make — $25 million of which, for No Time to Die, was spent on Craig. That film made $774 million worldwide — a decent sum during Covid, but the dominance of streaming has only increased since.
Chowdhury believes the recent Wall Street Journal article exposing division within the Bond ranks might have been briefed by Eon insiders — an attempt to reassure “the most important audience, the Amazon stockholders”, that despite tensions the two companies were at least working together. Late last year it was announced that Eon was remaking another of its titles, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with Amazon.
And now for the fun part: who that elusive actor might be. Here’s what we know so far. First, everybody I talk to — agents, actors, analysts — believes we are due a return to a Bond of quips and camp, a shift away from the Shakespearean heft of Craig. More traditional yet easier to sell via memes to Amazon’s younger demographic.
Broccoli has long kiboshed the idea of Bond being a woman. “He can be any colour, but he is male,” she said in 2020. The people I speak to coalesce around the following likely attributes: the next Bond will be white, good-looking, in their early to mid-thirties (about the age of Ian Fleming’s character) and will need someone able to devote a decade of their career to the role. They need a Goldilocks amount of fame — not too much, not too little — just as Craig had when he was cast.
“But Bond won’t be broken,” Chowdhury says of the next film, “because it’s ultimately a hugely successful brand and you don’t mess with that. You don’t turn a Coke can blue.”
Tom Hardy, 47, and Tom Hiddleston, 43, are now out of the picture as contenders, as are the long-rumoured James Norton, 39, and Aidan Turner, 41. “They were Sunday-night TV totty rumours,” O’Connell says. You can also probably discount Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan, who, if the rumours that they have signed up for Sam Mendes’s Beatles biopics are true, won’t have the time.
The job of the next Bond is now light years away from what Craig had to do. Whoever gets cast will have a very different contract to previous 007s. It used to be so simple: sign on for three films and an optional fourth. Now agents expect something clause-heavy, covering expected spin-offs into TV series and video games.
Eon has never been as shy of this as purists claim. There was the James Bond Jr TV series in the early 1990s, while 1997’s GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 is one of the greatest video games of all time. Amazon launched the reality show 007: Road to a Million, hosted by the actor Brian Cox, in 2023. But according to Chowdhury, Bond is still seen as “undercapitalised” compared with, say, Star Wars, with its 24 TV series. “They’re not wringing every last cent from it,” he says.
Already there are rumours of how Bond might be grown — whether via a rumoured Miss Moneypenny spin-off, another go at young Bond, or a period TV show based on Fleming’s novels. It means that agents will have to sign clients bold enough to step into Craig’s shoes for a run of films, as well as vocal and image work for video games, guest appearances in any subsidiary TV shows, and maybe adverts. “I don’t think Broccoli is against this,” Chowdhury says. “Eon just want to get the film done first.”
The Bond brand is as tangled as its villainous antagonist, Spectre. When the former Fast Show writer Charlie Higson launched his set of Young Bond books with SilverFin in 2005, his excited publisher wanted to piggyback on the imminent film Casino Royale by using the Bond logo on the dust jacket. The issue? The novels are published by Ian Fleming Publications but the logo rights are owned by Eon. So no logo.
Even so, Higson — who went on to write four more Young Bond novels, as well as a special adult Bond novella for King Charles’s coronation — suggests that these books offer a path that the Bond overlords could follow.
“A lot of literary estates are very precious,” Higson says. “But the Fleming board want new ideas. The literary side is useful in keeping Bond alive for fans when there isn’t a film, and obviously we are in a big hiatus. There is a new Qseries of books next year [The Q Mysteries by Vaseem Khan] and Kim Sherwood’s books about the other 007s.”
The latter series launched in 2022 with a story about Bond going missing and his fellow MI6 spies 003, 004 and 009 taking his place. As Higson says, it shows Eon and Amazon what can be done — although the villain in Sherwood’s novel is a tech billionaire, which might not appeal to Bezos.
Still, something surely has to be done, and soon. Bond mimics, from Eddie Redmayne’s The Day of the Jackal to Keira Knightley’s Black Doves, crop up almost monthly. Is there a danger that Eon and Amazon might leave things too long?
“It’s nonsense to say that suddenly people don’t want those types of hero characters,” Higson says. “In such murky times the idea of the fantasy villain that Bond can deal with appeals hugely. He cuts through the bullshit, sorts things out with a car, gun, drink, witty quip.” Or as Chowdhury surmises, people care: “No one asks, ‘Is this the end of Jason Bourne?’”
And he’s right. Along with the Beatles, Bond represents one of the pillars of British cultural soft power, and the appetite for a new film is arguably stronger than ever. Maybe Eon was sending us a message with the song that played over the end credits for No Time to Die: Louis Armstrong’s We Have All the Time in the World. But do they?
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,217Chief of Staff
Thanks for that @Silhouette Man I did see the headline, but obviously couldn’t read the article…until now 😁
YNWA 97
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,940MI6 Agent
An interesting conglomerate article, in that it doesn't tell us anything we haven't already considered. Still, a good read after breakfast & thanks for posting.
Yes not much in it but thanks for sharing. I wasn't massively convinced that the publisher wanted the Bond logo on Higson's books; not for more than ten minutes anyway.
Comments
Phew, I was worried y'all wouldn't find another woman to blame this on.
🤣
I'm not "confident" Amazon will do right by Bond. But you said "With Amazon, you can be sure there will be radical changes..." We cannot be sure there will be radical changes. I've given an example where they did not make radical changes to source material. We shall see.
But I will say this, I don't trust Barbara Broccoli any more than I trust Amazon.
I just watched the trailer for Reacher season 3 from Amazon Prime. Looks legit to me and true to Lee Child's Jack Reacher. Amazon doesn't screw up every property they acquire.
It helps when the author is alive and they have a significant input so it can't be screwed up.
https://torontosun.com/entertainment/television/lee-child-says-alan-ritchson-nails-jack-reacher-in-new-amazon-series
I got very bored in the middle of the first series and gave up. The first film was much better if you ask me.
Yes, he's taller now.
Didn’t help in the two films…at all.
The two movies were 100% kickass. Many of the book fans couldn't get past Reacher's height, which for the uninitiated is 6'5" in the books. So Tom Cruise isn't exactly the right actor for the job. And I get that. But the stories were excellent.
I thought the second one was a bit weak, but the first film is fantastic. It has a real 1970s Hollywood thriller vibe, like a Dirty Harry movie, and is terrific stuff.
I think it kind of compares to the Bond casting conversation, because there's always calls that the actor should be exactly as Fleming described; but I've seen Tom Cruise play Reacher, and I've seen a large man play Reacher, and I know Reacher is large in the books, but for me Tom Cruise was much better because he's one of the best movie stars ever and gave the better performance. The other guy is indeed large, but that didn't change anything about the character for me- he still did the same things, and there's no difference other than a lot of scenes opening with other characters saying "oh you're large". Once you're beyond that you have a middling actor who's not as good as Tom Cruise.
I get that if you've read the books apparently his largeness is somehow key, but that didn't really come across in the three-quarters or so of a series I made it though (before I got bored of them travelling between half a dozen boring houses and asking questions over and over again).
If you enjoyed them, then good. The first is passable, the second is poor…the stories are good, just executed poorly…no wonder Lee Child didn’t want Cruise anywhere near Reacher…
I can't see any interviews where he expressed that view: it's mostly that he said the fans felt his size was too important. I think the point he makes in this interview is good:
However, he said that it was “interesting” that those who hadn’t read his books “really liked those movies” as “they were kind of convinced by Cruise”.
The first film is absolutely terrific; no idea why you think it's executed poorly- maybe take it on its own terms rather than worry about how close it is to the book. I can find Moonraker to be enormous fun and not worry too much that it's not exactly a perfect representation of Fleming's novel.
Lee Child actively tried to keep Cruise away from Reacher…Cruise ended up using a third party and a BIG check…once Child saw it was going to happen anyway, he changed his tune…
If you like very formulaic movies - go ahead…it’s not particularly scripted well…but if you like that sort of thing 🤷🏻♂️
If you like very formulaic movies - go ahead
You know this is a forum for Bond movies, yeah? 😂
I've seen no evidence for your claim about Child, if it's out there: fine, I can't claim to be invested in Reacher lore, but nothing I've seen has supported your claim and you haven't backed it up, so I've no reason to believe it just yet.
It's a very well-made and quite stylish thriller, much better than the Amazon series, which is boring. The film is written by one of the best blockbuster scriptwriters in the business- the way it deals with the sniper's identity (which I believe is hidden in the book from the outset but obviously can't be in a movie) is very clever indeed. The show is formulaic without the style, flair or charismatic central performance. Maybe the books are just formulaic, they seem it as far as I can tell.
It’s not my fault you have “seen no evidence” - go and do a proper search…I’m not here to spoon feed you.
Believe it or don’t - I don’t care.
The Amazon series is FAR superior…if you haven’t got the attention span to watch it - don’t.
I don't understand why you're trying to make this so aggressive and personal: you feel you have to try and insinuate there's something wrong with me (I like 'formulaic' stuff, I haven't 'got the attention span' etc.) because I like a film or don't like a show, it's a very underhand way of debating about a bit of media and seems unnecessarily designed to try and raise the temperature of a conversation and turn it into an argument. I don't get why you feel the need to do that.
If you think the series is superior I'm happy to consider any viewpoints you have on it. I think the film is a top bit of pulpy fun because of the elements I mentioned (the 70s thriller Dirty Harry-ish style, the clever writing, the good direction, the charismatic star etc.), and I found the series dull because it had none of the panache of the film and felt very by-the-numbers, and together with a repetitive investigation where they just went backwards and forwards between the same few places strung out over many episodes, it failed to keep my interest. Much like the second film, which I guess didn't bore me but I felt had the same slightly cheesy source material without that extra something the first movie had. If you do something as trite and old hat as a mysterious, hard-as-nails drifter character, you've got to do it really well to lift it.
We could all insult each as much as we like to claim there's some deficiency in one another because we liked or disliked things which we all feel differently about, but that would make any forum unbearable to take part in. If you want an argument (about Jack Reacher of all things!) you can have it on your own.
I’m not making anything personal or aggressive…that’s your MO…I probably still have an PM from you calling me all sorts of stuff…and quite a few complaints about you…I always find it strange that you start niggling at people and then try and claim the high ground 🤷🏻♂️ send me another PM if you like…but lets leave this here…
I'm happy to chat on PM if you want but please don't accuse me of 'calling you all sorts of stuff' on a thread for others to read - that didn't happen.
I can’t imagine any Jack Reacher book fans (I am one) thinking the movies are a good representation. The stories are understandably edited down and suffer for that, and the second one, in particular, is far removed from the novel. Tom Cruise is totally wrong for the role. If you take the two movies as a man called Jack Reacher (nothing to do with the book character) then they are perfectly adequate thrillers. I do not get the Dirty Harry comparison, it’s totally different in style.
The Amazon series is terrific. Very close to the books. The 8-episode format lends itself to the more detailed adaption of the books. I like a slower pace so the complexities of the plot can be developed properly. Alan Ritchson is as good a match for the book Reacher as could possibly be, he brings the character to life, his acting is perfectly good for the role. The series format is perfect for the Reacher books which are detailed and complex, something that is not possible to convey in a 2 hour movie.
If you say so.
I agree wholeheartedly 😃
I think yeah, having not read the books I see them as good thrillers (or the first one anyway), as I say above: I'm not too worried about how close they are to the books as I'm coming to them as films. I totally get that fans of the books would be annoyed at his lack of largeness as it seems a defining character trait: I guess it's not unlike a Batman adaptation having the main character not dressing up as a bat. And they are very popular books so obviously they're good at what they do. But as it is I think the film is effective without it, and comparing the series and film the character's traits seemed very close in the two to me.
I think it's absolutely got the 70s thriller style to it though, I guess even down to the car Reacher ends up driving about. And the opening sniper sequence is very evocative of the Scorpio sequences from DH, that slow lingering style. I went back and checked out some reviews and I can see I'm not the first to say it (and most reviews are very positive- I even found the Reacher subreddit and surprisingly even some of the fans there say the movies are better: opinion is more divided than I expected). Even the main characters of Jack and Harry are hardly too different in their approach and outlook, I think it works very well.
I guess as we're talking about it from the point of Amazon doing source material well, I'd have to say that I found their Jack Ryan pretty disappointing overall although fairly watchable fluff. He got turned into a special forces superhero, which didn't feel right for Ryan to me- I know he had a backstory of the marines in the books, but they really leant on that a lot with him leading all of these special missions in full military fatigues all the time.
JACK REACHER is pretty great. I have no dog to kick with Cruise not being the book character's size...it's a film, and it's a very well executed film at that.
JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK is the film that we all feared the first film would be. Flat out terrible.
I like the new REACHER series. It's a different dynamic than the films so it feels like its own thing. On a level of delivery, it feels akin to the first film in terms of overall quality, so I'm satisfied.
I think the first Reacher movie worked very well. Cruise was good in it in spite of his size. To put it another way: His size worked against him, but Cruise's skill and star power made it work anyway.
I hope to god they don't mess up the franchise.
Check out my Instagram: @livingthebondlife
"I never joke about my work, 007."
I thought this recent article retrieved from my Times subscription might be suitable for inclusion here:
What’s gone wrong with James Bond? No star, no script, no plan
It has been ten years since Daniel Craig said he was done with 007 — and three since he died on screen. Jonathan Dean investigates how Bond HQ lost the plot
Shaken or stirring: is there life left in the old spy?
Jonathan Dean
Sunday January 26 2025, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
There was a stunned hush at the Royal Albert Hall on September 28, 2021, as the closing credits rolled on the world premiere of No Time to Die. Fans and royal guests, including Prince Charles, took stock: their hero had just been blown to smithereens. He was dead. Was that it? No more martinis for Mr Bond?
The panic, though, was short-lived, as the final words on screen announced: “James Bond will return.” But the questions soon started buzzing. When and how would 007 rise again, and who would it be? James Bond is dead! Long live James Bond?
No Time to Die hit cinemas almost three and a half years ago. There have been three prime ministers since then, and that prince is now King Charles. But there is still no new 007 —only a simmering national debate as we await the seventh Bond, seemingly no closer to finding the right man to replace Daniel Craig.
In truth, the quest for a new Bond has been running for a decade, ever since Craig said — on promo duties for Spectre in 2015 — that he would rather “slash my wrists” than play the spy again. He returned for No Time to Die but walked off set for the last time in 2019. Like Blofeld’s bomb, time is now ticking on Britain’s biggest movie export, as once-mooted replacements such as Idris Elba grow too old and industry sages begin to wonder if our restless pop culture has simply moved on.
Bond has never been in such a fine mess — much of it because of a seismic business deal that set the franchise’s wizened guardians up against the latest brash kid on the block. In 2021 Amazon bought MGM for $8.45 billion, acquiring MGM’s financial stake in the James Bond franchise through its partnership with Eon Productions.
Amazon’s executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, the man with the golden everything, is not the brains most people wanted in charge — “We can develop that IP for the 21st century,” he declared of 007 — but there was one detail about the deal that Bond fans clung to. Despite Amazon’s purchase, the contract stated that the Eon supremos Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson would retain creative control. Theirs was a historic company deeply invested in the big screen — except now they were working with the same streamer you bought your lawnmower off. What could possibly go wrong?
I have met Broccoli on numerous occasions and she was always friendly, if steely and not afraid to be blunt. So when, at the end of 2021, I asked what the Amazon deal meant for Bond, she was not exactly effusive. “The truth is we don’t know,” she said. “We are not really any more enlightened about how we fit in.”
And how is that relationship going now? “These people are f***ing idiots,” an exasperated Broccoli told friends last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Or, as her father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, once said: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”
Barbara Broccoli, 64, bleeds Bond. Her father passed her the reins when he died in 1996, but she had been working in some capacity on the franchise since The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977.
“Barbara is the perfect captain,” says Mark O’Connell, a Bond scholar and the author of Catching Bullets: Memoirs of a Bond Fan. “A lot of fans say her father would be rolling in his grave over what they did to Bond, but no — he’d actually be dancing a jig.” The most successful Bond films of all time at the box office, clocking up ten Oscar nominations, have starred Craig. “But the flip side is, where do they go now?”
The spy series has been here before. A combination of financial pressures, a change of lead and questions about Bond’s place in a post-Soviet world meant there were six years, four months and ten days between 1989’s Licence to Kill (Timothy Dalton’s curtain call) and 1995’s GoldenEye (the first to feature Pierce Brosnan). That is, as yet, the longest gap between Bond films.
The next Bond will have to be released by February 2028 to avoid taking that unwanted record. Yet such a time frame seems optimistic.The industry consensus is that we will be waiting another three years at least. Of course, the producers need a script, a director and an actor. But according to Ajay Chowdhury, a film industry lawyer and a co-author of Spy Octane: The Vehicles of James Bond, the immediate and most difficult task is the labyrinth of existing deals, involving MGM, Amazon, Universal and United Artists, that must be negotiated before anyone can slip on 007’s dinner jacket.
“The Bond franchise is like a plot of land and Amazon is still building the foundations,” Chowdhury says. “Casting a star is as far off as choosing curtains.” Since the last Bond, he explains, the business of cinema has changed. “Covid means movies make less money at cinemas now, so any Bond film needs to be budgeted accordingly. It’s unsexy, but right now they’re working out the back-end deal.”
That recalibration may even mean a shift away from Pinewood to filming abroad — anything to reduce the cost of building expensive semi-permanent sets.
Adding to the delay is the struggling blockbuster business. Seemingly sure-fire hits such as the Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones sequels have all floundered at the box office. The last lost an estimated $143 million. “There is a real pause in confidence on big films,” O’Connell says. “And that filters down to Bond.”
The average blockbuster costs at least $250 million to make — $25 million of which, for No Time to Die, was spent on Craig. That film made $774 million worldwide — a decent sum during Covid, but the dominance of streaming has only increased since.
Chowdhury believes the recent Wall Street Journal article exposing division within the Bond ranks might have been briefed by Eon insiders — an attempt to reassure “the most important audience, the Amazon stockholders”, that despite tensions the two companies were at least working together. Late last year it was announced that Eon was remaking another of its titles, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with Amazon.
And now for the fun part: who that elusive actor might be. Here’s what we know so far. First, everybody I talk to — agents, actors, analysts — believes we are due a return to a Bond of quips and camp, a shift away from the Shakespearean heft of Craig. More traditional yet easier to sell via memes to Amazon’s younger demographic.
Broccoli has long kiboshed the idea of Bond being a woman. “He can be any colour, but he is male,” she said in 2020. The people I speak to coalesce around the following likely attributes: the next Bond will be white, good-looking, in their early to mid-thirties (about the age of Ian Fleming’s character) and will need someone able to devote a decade of their career to the role. They need a Goldilocks amount of fame — not too much, not too little — just as Craig had when he was cast.
“But Bond won’t be broken,” Chowdhury says of the next film, “because it’s ultimately a hugely successful brand and you don’t mess with that. You don’t turn a Coke can blue.”
Tom Hardy, 47, and Tom Hiddleston, 43, are now out of the picture as contenders, as are the long-rumoured James Norton, 39, and Aidan Turner, 41. “They were Sunday-night TV totty rumours,” O’Connell says. You can also probably discount Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan, who, if the rumours that they have signed up for Sam Mendes’s Beatles biopics are true, won’t have the time.
The job of the next Bond is now light years away from what Craig had to do. Whoever gets cast will have a very different contract to previous 007s. It used to be so simple: sign on for three films and an optional fourth. Now agents expect something clause-heavy, covering expected spin-offs into TV series and video games.
Eon has never been as shy of this as purists claim. There was the James Bond Jr TV series in the early 1990s, while 1997’s GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 is one of the greatest video games of all time. Amazon launched the reality show 007: Road to a Million, hosted by the actor Brian Cox, in 2023. But according to Chowdhury, Bond is still seen as “undercapitalised” compared with, say, Star Wars, with its 24 TV series. “They’re not wringing every last cent from it,” he says.
Already there are rumours of how Bond might be grown — whether via a rumoured Miss Moneypenny spin-off, another go at young Bond, or a period TV show based on Fleming’s novels. It means that agents will have to sign clients bold enough to step into Craig’s shoes for a run of films, as well as vocal and image work for video games, guest appearances in any subsidiary TV shows, and maybe adverts. “I don’t think Broccoli is against this,” Chowdhury says. “Eon just want to get the film done first.”
The Bond brand is as tangled as its villainous antagonist, Spectre. When the former Fast Show writer Charlie Higson launched his set of Young Bond books with SilverFin in 2005, his excited publisher wanted to piggyback on the imminent film Casino Royale by using the Bond logo on the dust jacket. The issue? The novels are published by Ian Fleming Publications but the logo rights are owned by Eon. So no logo.
Even so, Higson — who went on to write four more Young Bond novels, as well as a special adult Bond novella for King Charles’s coronation — suggests that these books offer a path that the Bond overlords could follow.
“A lot of literary estates are very precious,” Higson says. “But the Fleming board want new ideas. The literary side is useful in keeping Bond alive for fans when there isn’t a film, and obviously we are in a big hiatus. There is a new Qseries of books next year [The Q Mysteries by Vaseem Khan] and Kim Sherwood’s books about the other 007s.”
The latter series launched in 2022 with a story about Bond going missing and his fellow MI6 spies 003, 004 and 009 taking his place. As Higson says, it shows Eon and Amazon what can be done — although the villain in Sherwood’s novel is a tech billionaire, which might not appeal to Bezos.
Still, something surely has to be done, and soon. Bond mimics, from Eddie Redmayne’s The Day of the Jackal to Keira Knightley’s Black Doves, crop up almost monthly. Is there a danger that Eon and Amazon might leave things too long?
“It’s nonsense to say that suddenly people don’t want those types of hero characters,” Higson says. “In such murky times the idea of the fantasy villain that Bond can deal with appeals hugely. He cuts through the bullshit, sorts things out with a car, gun, drink, witty quip.” Or as Chowdhury surmises, people care: “No one asks, ‘Is this the end of Jason Bourne?’”
And he’s right. Along with the Beatles, Bond represents one of the pillars of British cultural soft power, and the appetite for a new film is arguably stronger than ever. Maybe Eon was sending us a message with the song that played over the end credits for No Time to Die: Louis Armstrong’s We Have All the Time in the World. But do they?
Thanks for that @Silhouette Man I did see the headline, but obviously couldn’t read the article…until now 😁
You're welcome, @Sir Miles. I was going to get rid of the subscription but at £5 a month sometimes it comes in useful. 😉
An interesting conglomerate article, in that it doesn't tell us anything we haven't already considered. Still, a good read after breakfast & thanks for posting.
Yes not much in it but thanks for sharing. I wasn't massively convinced that the publisher wanted the Bond logo on Higson's books; not for more than ten minutes anyway.