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What’s gone wrong with James Bond? No star, no script, no plan

It has been ten years since Daniel Craig said he was done with 007 — and three since he died on screen. Jonathan Dean investigates how Bond HQ lost the plot

A combination of financial pressures, a change of lead and questions about Bond’s place in a post-Soviet world meant there were six years, four months and ten days between 1989’s Licence to Kill(Timothy Dalton’s curtain call) and 1995’s GoldenEye(the first to feature Pierce Brosnan). But according to Ajay Chowdhury, a film industry lawyer and a co-author of Spy Octane: The Vehicles of James Bond, the immediate and most difficult task is the labyrinth of existing deals, involving MGM, Amazon, Universal and United Artists, that must be negotiated before anyone can slip on 007’s dinner jacket. Chowdhury believes the recent Wall Street Journal article exposing division within the Bond ranks might have been briefed by Eon insiders — an attempt to reassure “the most important audience, the Amazon stockholders”, that despite tensions the two companies were at least working together.

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