The James Bond franchise needs a reboot — but how?
(Alamy)
It was great to be back in a movie theatre to watch the new Bond, No Time to Die and even the bladder-testing 163 minute running time didn’t put me off. But it is clear from this being Daniel Craig’s last outing, and a couple of other things I won’t mention, that the franchise is in need of a reboot. How can that be done?
In regular businesses, the efforts in research and development produce products which then sustain the company’s future. Tesla is on course for a $2 trillion valuation according to Forbes, but it effectively has only four products and an awful lot of production: importantly, demand is way ahead of that production. The R&D effort at Tesla is truly impressive, but those ideas only make it through to the finished product after extensive — often destructive — testing. Tesla is currently worth 31 times earnings.
In Hollywood, Netflix is spending $17bn on production this year, as reported in Variety and has a market valuation of “just” $197bn, still Bigger than Disney. Netflix is valued at 26 times earnings — not so different from Tesla. Netflix could be said to have just one product.
Netflix is the biggest example of Dot Com money moving into Hollywood. Mostly venture capitalists are interested in sequels and remakes. Why? Because the returns — if less spectacular than more original films — can be quantified.
In film production everything is normally a prototype. In a franchise it’s more like an early production line. The audience regards the last film as a guarantee of quality, no matter how misguided that might be, resulting in more predictable box office takings.
Franchises vary from Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, where each instalment takes you further into a story, to Bond, Bourne and Mission Impossible, where each film is (critics shoot me now) the same story and the differences add interest. (Ana de Armas, who stars in the latest Bond, is an example of this variation.)
The business model in music — slightly less applicable in today’s film production — used to be that for every ten pieces of product, two break even, seven make a loss, but one makes so much money it makes up for the other nine. Some studios have bucked the trend, but it broadly survives. Pixar has been a notable outlier and several smaller producers have also beaten the numbers for a time.
Franchises are the way to outdo industry norms. Some run their course — there can be no more Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings films until there are more books to film. Bourne seems to be over. Fast and Furious will keep cranking out the same story until fans get bored.
I have a personal theory that each Bond film oscillates between “good” and “average”. See if you agree. In her book Improv Your Life, the comedienne and improviser Pippa Evans talks about the “11 o’clock Rule”. Whatever happens at a gig you can only own it until 11am the next day. If the gig went badly, you can’t go on stage the following night feeling like a terrible failure; you need to get rid of that judgement “by 11am”. Conversely, if the gig went fabulously, unless you get over yourself, you’ll go on the following night feeling overconfident, which is just as bad.
So, each super-successful Bond film — for me that’s Casino Royale and Skyfall in the last tranche — guarantees the audience for the next. Whereas each mis-step means the next film has to win an audience on its own merits, forcing producers to up their game.
When an era ends, so do all the interconnected storylines which have marked the Daniel Craig Bond films. The reflective final scene in No Time to Die reminded me that all the supporting actors’ tenure was also at an end.
Where next, then, for the Bond franchise?
If I were the Creative Director of Eon Productions — and I stress that I am not and will never be — a continual evolving “current day” version of Bond is now untenable, unless it is the next person in-universe to take the moniker. I would take it back to the original books and produce a version set in the 1950s, the height of the Cold War. No clever gadgets, no internet moguls. That has enough resonance for the fans of the series, and might also attract a new audience.
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