Have the bad guys finally won? After decades of taking down megalomaniacs with designs on the world, James Bond appears to have been bested by a bald man with far too much power. No, not Blofeld. Jeff Bezos, whose company Amazon just secured all creative rights to the James Bond franchise.Okay, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but Amazon’s takeover does feel like the final battle lost on the pop culture landscape. Imperfect as it has been, the James Bond franchise was among the last to be run by actual people who cared deeply about maintaining the series’ integrity and not pumping it for every dollar its IP could secrete. The Bond franchise needed a change, but it’s hard to see a streaming service as the right stewards of such a massive pop culture figure.The Man With the Golden Expense AccountEarly in Casino Royale, James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) engage in banter that falls somewhere between flirtation and contempt. “MI6 maladjusted young men who’d give little thought to sacrificing others to protect queen and country. You know—former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches,” says Lynd, pausing only to glance down at Bond’s wrist. “Rolex?”“Omega,” he responds.Bond delivers the line as if his purchasing power was a declaration of identity. And in this franchise, it is. James Bond movies have always been power fantasies of capitalism and British imperialism, stories about a charming man with the licence to kill anyone who threatens Britian’s political or commercial interests. So embedded in the franchise is this ethos that even Casino Royale, which radically reinvented the character into a complex man with genuine pathos, cannot avoid craven product placement.If any franchise might deserve to be purchased by the 21st century’s foremost force of rampant inequality and cheap consumer goods, it’s James Bond.Yet the series has never been about only hawking luxury products. It’s also been about embracing the spectacle of cinema with widescreen stunts that push film technology forward. The Bond series has been responsible for some of the most iconic moments in movie history: the visceral fight scene in From Russia With Love, the Union Jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me, basically anything shot on a set designed by Ken Adam. Even if the series tended to choose competent journeymen to helm its entries instead of auteurs (more on that in a minute), Bond movies distilled for general audiences the power of movies to create awe, thrills, and beauty.Moreover, the franchise has been able to tell genuinely moving stories, which often acknowledged the fundamental flaw of its central character. Even before the Daniel Craig era, it was clear to anyone paying attention that James Bond was a broken man, a blunt instrument whose nice suits and trail of women belied a fundamental emptiness in service of a crumbling empire. The brutality of Sean Connery and Timothy Dalton, the melancholy of George Lazenby and Daniel Craig, even the bumbling within the otherwise debonair airs of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan also suggested a man far more complicated than he appeared on the surface.Is this complexity because of Eon Productions’ control of the character, as shepherded by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Barbara Broccoli, and Michael G. Wilson (stepson to Cubby Broccoli)? Or is it in spite of them?Mr. NoBy 1977, Steven Spielberg had just made a massive hit that surpassed box office records. Twice. Hot off the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his follow up to Jaws, Spielberg went to Cubby Broccoli and begged to direct a Bond movie. It was the third time that Broccoli turned down Spielberg, who had already pitched the Eon boss after Duel and Jaws. Instead Broccoli decided to stick with Lewis Gilbert, who had made the (really good!) The Spy Who Loved Me, and would next make the (really bad!) Moonraker.No part of that story reflects well upon Eon. Why turn down Spielberg, already well on his way to becoming the greatest blockbuster director of all time? Worse, the producers rejected Spielberg to go with a crass Star Wars knockoff, which made the franchise look stodgy, old, and at least one step behind the culture.It was hardly the first or last Eon misstep. It’s not just the clanger about listening to the Beatles without earmuffs in 1964’s Goldfinger. It’s the attempt to cash in on trends after they’ve become popular elsewhere, from the Blaxploitation of Live and Let Die to the tired parkour in Casino Royale. Eon had no problem trying to get in on the latest craze or pitching wares if there was a buck in it.Then there are also the creative risks the franchise avoided. Sure, there have been some big swings, but the formula always comes first: open with an unrelated adventure before Bond gets his next mission, visits exotic locales, has sex with two women—the first dies and the second sticks around—before finally defeating the villain with whom Bond has been heretofore paling around with. Finally, there is then more sex to be had with the second girl (preferably while scandalizing Q or M) before the final title card arrives. The End. James Bond will return.Anyone who has threatened to mess with that formula—not just the American Spielberg, but Brits such as Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan—are blocked out. When Sam Mendes does something different, he does so consciously working within the limitations of the formula. Because, ultimately, Eon exists to keep Bond safe, familiar, and profitable. Hardly the most noble aesthetic ideals.On His Majesty’s Streaming ServiceAccording to the many insider reports that have come in the wake of the major Bond shakeup, tensions had been building between Amazon and Barbara Broccoli (who had been the lone leader of Eon after Wilson stepped back on No Time to Die) over the future of the franchise.By all accounts, Broccoli was the chief creative force in the Daniel Craig movies, choosing the less conventional, blond-haired actor over favorites such as Clive Owen and Henry Cavill, and letting the storyline come to its natural conclusion with Bond’s death in No Time to Die. Yet Broccoli had also been reluctant to cast a new actor and set the direction of a new series, despite gestures to the contrary, such as meeting with Aaron Taylor-Johnson. According to an anonymous source quoted by Deadline, these meetings were “just as kind of an ongoing, keeping your eye out on who’s around, but keeping in touch. But I definitely don’t think that there was any frontrunner. They wanted to know what they wanted to do next before they thought of the right person for it.”A generous reading of Broccoli’s actions would argue that she was taking her time with the next project, as any good artist should. But Eon doesn’t have the track record to back up such an interpretation, making the delay look more like an absence of ideas.And so, it might be a good thing that someone else gets to run Bond for a bit, even if it’s Amazon. In fact, the company has been surprisingly good about supporting interesting art. Amazon’s Prime Video is the home of favorites such as Reacher, Fallout, and The Boys, the last of which offers cutting satire that does not spare its parent company. The film production and division arm, which now includes MGM and its subsidiaries, continues to support interesting work and put in theaters, not just burying it on streaming. Projects range from innovative works like Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and the remake of Road House.In short, Amazon has shown a greater commitment to advancing the art of moving pictures than Eon has.That said, Amazon doesn’t support these projects out of altruism. The company exists to make money and it will do anything that helps them achieve that goal, which underscores one of Barbara Broccoli’s biggest problems with the company. Reportedly, Amazon wants to follow Disney’s approach to Marvel and Star Wars, turning James Bond into a shared universe with endless spinoff shows. As another unnamed source told Deadline, “Without Barbara’s careful supervision, Bond just becomes Jack Reacher in some TV show.”ContentRakerThis resistance to IP-mining is the real reason that the loss of Eon’s control seems tragic. It’s not that everything Disney has done with Star Wars and Marvel has been bad. Andor remains a remarkable piece of science fiction, and most MCU entries remain good to great. But its clear that the interesting stuff happens as an accident as the company searches for easy money, not as the impetus for a project.Worse, James Bond’s world is limited. Yes, he has supporting characters such as Felix Leiter, M, and Moneypenny, all of whom theoretically have room for their own adventures. But all of these characters revolve around Bond himself. Turning a supporting figure or even a foil into a protagonist requires a radical reimagining of their function. Furthermore, instead of serving as a check or counter to Bond’s more unsavory elements, making these characters into protagonists could end up normalizing him, as they too need to have their own moral quandaries and questionable sexual escapades in order to retain that “007 feel.”On an aesthetic level, the potential of spinoffs only reinforces the worst qualities of the modern pop culture landscape. As seen in countless Star Wars and especially Star Trek iterations, studios put easy fan service over basic storytelling and character development. The Star Trek movie Section 31 might be the most high-profile recent example, which acted like the inclusion of a deep cut character from The Next Generation would inherently creates its own dramatic stakes. It did not.So while we can imagine something interesting like a Live and Let Die series from Black creators that dealt with the political and cultural fallout of a white British agent interfering in local politics—something that would never happen under Eon’s control—Amazon is far more likely to make Tee Hee: Origins, an eight-episode drama in the vein of The Penguin, which ends with the central character losing his hands.Perhaps that’s what Eon understood better than anyone else. Against an anonymous source who told Deadline that the recent run of films was “a gold standard,” maybe Eon knew that Bond wasn’t gold at all. Maybe they understood the limitations of the character better than anyone else and fought to tell the best possible stories within those limitations.It’s hard to imagine even a well-meaning and talented creative at Amazon doing the same. Time to DieThe news of the Eon era’s end has made No Time to Die feel so much more significant. On the one hand, No Time to Die is a rarity among big franchises, even within James Bond: a movie that finishes a complete story. By the time credits roll, Bond has died, fully reaching the end of his arc. Taken together, the Craig films feel less like new adventures of a pop culture icon and more like a proper piece of fiction with a compelling, human character at the center.On the other hand, No Time to Die also features elements that could make for good spinoffs. Lashana Lynch’s new 007 is a compelling figure throughout the movie, and it would be interesting to see how MI6 operates in the modern world with a Black woman as the defender of British imperialism. Ana de Armas steals every one of her scenes as a plucky junior agent, leaving audiences wanting more after her brief screen time.Could these characters make for good spinoff stories? Sure. Are we confident that Amazon (or any other big studio) would do it right? Absolutely not. And so No Time to Die truly is an end. An end for Craig’s Bond, an end for Eon, and potentially the end of good franchise storytelling. At least for now.The post James Bond Needed a Change, But Amazon Isn’t It appeared first on Den of Geek.