creative control of the James Bond franchise to Amazon MGM Studios for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, many 007 fans feared that the character’s new stewards would turn him into a many-tentacled spin-off machine. There would be movies and streaming series dictated not by filmmakers with a deep affection for Ian Fleming’s books and the 60-plus year movie franchise, but rather the dreaded, wholly untrustworthy algorithm. It was an agonizingly perverse end for James Bond, to be purchased and destroyed by real-life Bond villain Jeff Bezos.
While it’s far too early to be optimistic, the news that several visionary directors have pitched Amazon MGM Studios with their ideas for a new Bond movie suggests that the company, which isn’t often in the habit of making good movies, could hire an A-lister and get the heck out of their way. Why else would filmmakers like Edgar Wright, Denis Villeneuve, Edward Berger, Paul King, and Jonathan Nolan bother in the first place (he asks without knowing what kind of money is on the table)?
Could it be a bad sign that Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón dropped out of the 007 derby? Possibly. He’s got franchise filmmaking experience as the director of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” and might’ve seen unwinnable creative battles down the road. But if he just cooled on doing a Bond movie, and if Amazon MGM Studios is really, truly interested in letting great filmmakers take the franchise out for a spin with little-to-no executive interference, the company needs to reach out to Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy posthaste, because they’ve got a mothballed pitch that would give us a cinematic Bond we’ve never seen before.
