There’s been a pop culture online uproar in the last week. (I know, it’s shocking. That never happens!) This time, about James Bond. If you missed the whole thing (perhaps you were outside, smelling the flowers), here’s a summary of what happened: Amazon, which now owns the beloved James Bond franchise after bagging it in a megadeal, had planned a day celebrating the British spy and released a bunch of digital poster art for thumbnails on various platforms. Only it removed all of 007’s guns from said images, rather sanitizing him. Sean Connery’s Walther PPK? Gone. As were Daniel Craig and Roger Moore’s pistols – cropped out of their respective promotional pics.They photoshopped all the guns out of the James Bond movie thumbnails.Just in case you still had hope for Amazon being in charge of the franchise. pic.twitter.com/eeosPEPFnJ— John A. Douglas (@J0hnADouglas) October 3, 2025People noticed the changes fairly quickly and got quite grumpy at Amazon. A short time later, they’d changed all the new images back to stills from the Bond movies, but these were also gun-free. Naturally, no official comment was made on the matter. Stay quiet, let it pass. People will forget and move on. There’ll be another outrage along in a minute. Makes total sense. I mean, Steven Spielberg is still explaining his decision to remove the guns from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’s 20th anniversary release! We all make mistakes we cringe over later.But if we bypass the public outrage about removing the guns and focus on the act itself, one can’t help but wonder who Amazon thought James Bond was when they fell over themselves to buy him. He’s a violent government assassin, a relic of the Cold War and the era of imperialism. He’s also a womanizer (in the U.K., he might justifiably be branded what we call “a shagger”). This is the IP. Amazon can’t make 007 something he’s not by deleting a gun from a poster.In an era where studios are still desperately trying to make blockbusters with broad “four-quadrant” family-friendly appeal, Bond just doesn’t fit in with Spider-Man, Superman, or Steve from Minecraft, but that’s not Bond’s problem; it’s Amazon’s. Perhaps everyone working behind the scenes to launch a new Bond is still figuring out who Bond will be for a new generation, but that also means accepting who he was. On one crucial level, Amazon just got a swift lesson about doing so.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Perhaps no one has learned that lesson faster or more publicly than Spielberg. “E.T. is a product of its era,” the director remarked when recalling his own gunless controversy. “No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there.”Besides, there’s clearly room for a successful, gun-toting, even more violent James Bond right now. Just ask Jonathan Wick.The post James Bond’s Gunless Promos Reveal Problem with 007 appeared first on Den of Geek.