Report: Amazon Is Struggling to Think How to Bring James Bond Back From the Dead

The viewing public has, by and large, accepted the fact that being the lead star in James Bond is kind of like another British staple, Doctor Who. You’re it for a little while, then someone else comes in and takes your place, and they’re it. But the Bond saga has not had to deal with the explicit fact Doctor Who deals with every few years as part of that process: that the previous one has to die for the next one to take their place. That is, until now… and it’s apparently causing issues.

A new report from Radar Online alleges that Amazon executives are struggling to come up with a new onboarding point for the next James Bond movie, from director Denis Villeneuve and writer Steven Knight, partially because they believe that a new film will have to explain why James Bond is up and about doing spyfi things after he got blown up by missiles in No Time to Die.

“The last time we saw Bond, he was poisoned and blown to smithereens—how will they get past the fact he is dead with a capital D?†Author Anthony Horowitz, who has penned several Bond books for the estate of Ian Fleming, told Radar Online, commenting on insider sources declaring the decision to kill Bond in No Time to Die “a massive mistake†that is proving “almost impossible†to undo. “I think that was a mistake, because Bond is a legend. He belongs to everybody, he is eternal—except in that film. If I was asked tomorrow to write the script, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Where would you start? You can’t have him waking up in the shower and saying it was all a dream.â€

The bizarre thing is that this appears to be an issue that mostly people at Amazon involved in the next James Bond movie are concerned with, and not anyone who actually watches James Bond movies. Although several of the films have tried to allude to a shared history for the character of James Bond (Skyfall going as far to give him an ancestral home in Scotland and even show the supposed graves of Bond’s parents), the average viewer has largely accepted that the various Bonds we’ve had over the years are not necessarily by and large the same character.

There’s never been a reason to explain, outside of popular theories like the codename idea, that Bond changes faces every few movies, because people have just accepted that that is part of the series’ longevity. It doesn’t necessarily matter that Craig’s Bond explicitly died on screen then, even though it’s something we’ve not actually seen with the character before, because, well, people knew it was Craig’s final film as Bond anyway. It’s part of the metanarrative that has become part of Bond as much as the actual storytelling has. So why are Amazon allegedly so hung up on it?

Previous reports have suggested that Knight’s script may focus on Bond’s early career as he transitions from the Royal Navy to intelligence work with MI6, leading up to the story of how he got his license to kill (a story we saw for Craig’s Bond in the opening of Casino Royale). If that’s the route Amazon takes, then you don’t really need to explain that the Bond you’re seeing is any different from the Bond we saw in No Time to Die. People will just accept the new, younger Bond and move on. But we’ll have to wait and see just how Amazon solves a problem that it is mostly creating for itself.

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