ALEX WOODCOCK-CLARKE says No Time To Die may have become too woke to live

Thrown off buildings, cliffs and dams, out of planes in their death spiral, into pools full of sharks, and once into bed with Grace Jones dressed as Satan. Assaulted by giants with steel teeth and midgets in bowler hats. James Bond has survived all this for 58 years. Yet soon, perhaps as soon as April 2021, No Time To Die, the latest Bond film, may achieve the dream of international maniacs everywhere: killing off the multi-billion dollar franchise he’s led since 1964.

The culprit will not be Netflix-age franchise fatigue nor even the larger ‘wokeness’ now infecting Hollywood, but a surprise villain in the heart of Bondage itself. You know her name. It’s charged with the phonemes of any femme fatale who’s ever shot, stabbed or drugged OO7. Rosa Klebb. Elektra King. Vesper Lynd. Faintly European, oddly evocatory, marked by stressed syllables. She is Barbara Broccoli, and she may be about to blow Bond 25, No Time To Die, sky-high.

Broccoli has been in charge of the billion-dollar Bond franchise since 1995 when her father, the famed Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, handed her control of EON (“Everything Or Nothing”) Productions which owns the entire Bond Intellectual Franchise. Broccoli’s control of IP is very nearly total (she shares ownership with her adopted half-brother Michael G. Wilson), and gives her a billion-dollar net worth that makes Auric Goldfinger look amateur. Such leverage makes her perhaps the most powerful female producer the film industry has ever seen, comments  the Guardian.

She and Wilson have been credited with saving the IP twice. Firstly, by relaunching it as a glamorous, slick Nineties actioner fronted by Pierce Brosnan with 1995’s GoldenEye and then again, when the Brosnan-era Bond staled into CGI invisible cars and diamond faces, by rebooting the franchise as a gritty, grim, shaky cam thriller fronted by her personal pick for the role, knobbly-faced, jug-eared Daniel Craig. “We got too fantastical,” commented Wilson ruefully. “We had to come back to Earth.”

As far as the accountants are concerned, the two co-producers went La Grande each time. While The World Is Not Enough (1999), Brosnan’s last 007, film made $431.9 million, the rebooted, re-Bonded Casino Royale came in at $669,789,482. Craig’s Bond film, 2012’s Skyfall scored the highest gross ($1,218,849,723) of all of them, and a profit of $910,526,981. Forbes magazine calculates that, adjusted for inflation, the Bond franchise has grossed $16,315,134,284. That makes it the fourth richest movie franchise of all time (behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars and Harry Potter). Together Broccoli and Wilson have pulled off a golden grand slam.

But now it’s 2020 and, make no mistake, of the two co-producers, Broccoli calls the shots. How the ownership of EON is divided is not known but Broccoli was Cubby’s blood child while Wilson is his adopted stepson. Even if ownership is equally divided, Wilson is now 77, and press articles suggest his energy is waning while his half-sister, a remarkably well-preserved 60, is just getting into her stride. “Barbara scares the hell out of people,” Wilson told the New York Times in one joint interview only to receive what the reporter calls “an O.K.-that’s-enough look”. In another interview, Variety noted her casting “a reproachful eye at Wilson when his attempts at humour strike her as ill-considered”.

It’s just as well Broccoli now holds a firm grip on EON’s production decisions because No Time To Die is a production already estimated to cost around $250,000,000 and juggles competing distribution, marketing and merchandising responsibilities between Sony, MGM, Omega and Heineken to name a few interested parties.

No one was surprised then when, EON announced on 4 March 2020 that after “thorough evaluation of the global theatrical marketplace”, No Time To Die’s release would be postponed until 12 November 2020. This was the first major production to be delayed as Hollywood responded to the pandemic. Media commentators approved the announcement. “Sensible” said Deadline Hollywood. “Necessary” commented the Radio Times. Launching the film into a dead market might have been catastrophic. The Hollywood Reporter estimates $5 billion has been wiped off the value of cinema receipts by COVID.

Except a closer read of the EON announcement reveals some real red wine-with-fish clues that all is not well with No Time To Die.  The press release was issued before most governments, particularly in the US or UK, had issued advisories, let alone sanctions, relating to the COVID crisis. A careful second reading also reveals it doesn’t mention the pandemic at all.

Delaying a film is expensive. Shifting the release date and sacrificing the time-fixed launch events, advertising and material (all of which are pre-bought sometimes years in advance) is calculated by The Hollywood Reporter to cost EON around $50 million; the whole marketing campaign had to be scrapped just after a $4.5 million Super Bowl ad had been screened. Yet this isn’t the first time No Time To Die’s launch has been delayed. Not even the second, or the third. On 2^nd October, a fourth release date was announced, of 2^nd April 2021.

The first delay occurred when EON producers fell out with the first choice to direct the film, veteran Danny Boyle. Citing “creative differences”, Boyle departed, and the launch was moved from October 2019 to 2020. A February launch was on schedule until without warning the film’s composer, Dan Romer, was suddenly dropped and replaced by Hans Zimmer. Again, “creative differences”.  The launch date was then moved to July. Then November. Now April. That means a film whose principal shooting was completed in October 2019 could be delayed almost two years before it ever hits the movie theatres.

And now there is another rumour. Emanating from Midnight’s Edge, an internet movie site, and picked up by a number of national newspapers, it reveals that EON ran a number of super-secret test screenings and that

Sources have informed Midnight’s Edge that a recent test screening of No Time To Die did not go well

While skating around specifics, the site concludes bluntly:

…they are using the outbreak as cover to avoid bad publicity

So, what’s gone wrong? And who’s to blame? The answer to both questions is Broccoli.

Broccoli has been positioning No Time To Die as the culmination of a five-film arc that began with Commander Bond’s career from recruitment into the service (Casino Royale) and now ends with his retirement in No Time To Die. This coincides very nicely with Daniel Craig’s own tenancy of the role (“That’s what he’s saying. Yes, he’s saying this is his last movie as Bond. Sadly”, commented Broccoli). More significantly, it’s also the climax of Broccoli’s most radical rebooting of the brand, to make Bond ‘woke’.

In 1962, Sean Connery was interviewed on about his forthcoming appearance in Dr No. He presciently analysed the character that he was to make into an icon:

I see Bond as a sensualist – his senses are highly tuned and he’s awake to everything. He likes his wine, his food and his women. He’s quite amoral. I particularly like him because he thrives on conflict – a quality lacking in present-day society

In just a few words, this galumphing Glaswegian bodybuilder-turned-milkman summarised the essence of what made Bond a hero to men for the next fifty-eight years. His selfish, stylish, combative pursuit of his own appetites that the rest of us must reel in and subsume in our responsibilities to our families, to our jobs, to our assigned roles in society. This archetype is unique amongst modern fictional heroes, and it’s uniquely British. It couldn’t be American which requires an element of self-sacrifice from its modern legends. Bruce Wayne’s crusade against crime derives from his tragic bereavement. Walter White builds his drug empire to support his family after his death. Even Homer Simpson, for all his oral-compulsive slobbishness, is all about family.

For all their differences in tone and style, Connery, Moore, Lazenby, Dalton and Brosnan were always true to that unique archetype. The lone warrior who does not apologise for being good at what he does and doing it for no other reason than he’s good at doing it.

Onscreen, castration is a motif introduced in Casino Royale (1953), the very first of the original books, and recurs through the films (once, in Goldfinger (1956), while strapped to a gold slab in danger of being bisected by an industrial laser, crotch-first). But since 2006, Barbara Broccoli had made some sharp and deep cuts beneath the waistband of the old fellow, and audiences have noticed.

It’s not just that Bond now prefers not vodka-martinis but Heineken beer (thanks to a product placement deal that reportedly netted the film nearly $45 million). It’s not that he now drives an Aston Martin Rapide E, an electric car (since when did the man who blew up a volcano care about his carbon footprint?). It’s not that he has less sex than any other Bond (six across five films compared to Roger Moore’s nineteen). It’s not even the bizarre plot jumps and anti-twists, Broccoli has forced into the story structure. (The villain’s big plan in Quantum of Solace? To steal all the water in Bolivia! Blofeld’s motivation for revenge in Spectre? His dad was Bond’s ski-instructor!)

No, the real reason fans are souring on Broccoli’s vision of Bond is that she has made him weepy, humourless and regretful. He shares tearful showers with his girlfriend at the awfulness of it all and he weeps buckets over the death of M in Skyfall (That said, the vision of Craig’s rubber walnut face melting with misery over Judy Dench’s upturned face is one of the funniest scenes in all Bondom). He doesn’t like his job. Bond doesn’t even want to be Bond anymore. In the new film, according to deliberately leaked information, No Time To Die Bond is retired and his OO7 status taken over by a – gasp! – black woman, Lashana Lynch. The Daily Mail reports this development like this:

A movie insider said: ‘There is a pivotal scene at the start of the film where M says ‘Come in 007’, and in walks Lashana who is black, beautiful and a woman. ‘It’s a popcorn-dropping moment. Bond is still Bond but he’s been replaced as 007 by this stunning woman’

Anthony Horowitz, the novelist and screenwriter hired by the Fleming Estate to write new James Bond books Triggor Mortis (2015) and Forever and a Day (2018), best sums up many people’s objections:

Bond is weak…He has doubts. That’s not Bond… It’s that sort of thing that made me angry

Madeline Grant of the Telegraph puts it another way:

If James Bond has gone woke, he might as well be cancelled

Why has Broccoli turned Bond into this lachrymose capon? The answer is simple. Sometime in the mid-2000s, she saw The Bourne Identity and its follow-ups. This thriller by Doug Liman starred an amnesiac American secret agent who fights shadowy governmental enemies while struggling all the time with severe emotional problems. These films intercut hyper-violent, visually incomprehensible shaky cam action sequences with scenes of Matt Damon, the star, in front of rain-streaked windows, looking out soulfully with brimming eyes into the darkness, like a basset hound finally realising he will never learn to use a doorknob. On a relatively small budget, the Bourne films turned a huge profit and wowed audiences with their ‘realistic’ take on the spy game.  One can imagine Broccoli sitting in a darkened viewing room, rising dramatically from her seat and declaiming to the world: “I’ve found my Bond!”.

The trouble is, Bourne isn’t Bond, and the world is beginning to see through the switch. It already registered its objections when the last Bond film before this one, Spectre, received ‘mixed reviews’ and grossed $879.6 million, an impressive figure until you realise it’s $200 million less than its predecessor, Skyfall (which grossed $1.111 billion).

If No Time To Dies does not match or exceed these figures, considering the vastly excessive additional costs imposed by the COVID crisis added to those of the director and crew changes, then the whole billion dollar franchise could go up like a volcano base. All across Hollywood once great and permanent franchises, from Star Wars to the DCVerse to Universal’s Dark Universe, are learning that one or more bad films can wreck previously rock-solid brands and sink the careers of once untouchable producers, like Barbara Broccoli.

Yahoo Movies recently reviewed the progress of production on the movie. It noted the delays, the sackings, the creative differences, the endless rewriting of the plot by five different writers. It quoted one

…straight-talking source [who] revealed that ‘the crew reckon they’re working on a well-polished shit show’

If true, then Bond may be looking down a gun barrel for the last time – and the finger on the trigger will be Broccoli’s.