James bond

The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family’s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.) Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise.

On my favorite Hollywood-focused podcast The Town, host Matt Belloni and his producer and guests offer predictions all the time on television ratings, relying on the Nielsen numbers for reference for what's anticipated versus what it turns out to be. Predictions for Saturday Night Live's fiftieth anniversary had it tracking above 20 million viewers — a reasonable expectation given the year-long promotional campaign and the fact that it would be on NBC, streaming on Peacock and on E! Network at the same time. The conversation on The Town was mostly a debate about whether it would hit 25 million, putting it well above expectations for the Oscars. Instead, it came in far lower, not even getting to 15 million — below the Grammy Awards, for sake of comparison.

If you’re a Paramount+ or Showtime subscriber, there’s a decent chance that you spent at least some of the Thanksgiving break watching the first two episodes of The Agency, the Michael Fassbender-fronted espionage drama that the company has invested a huge amount of money in. Based on the cult French series The Bureau, starring Matthieu Kassovitz, it’s a grim and self-consciously serious piece of drama, low on explosive shootouts and one-liners and high on tortured scenes of introspection, as Fassbender’s deep-cover operative, codename Martian, is brought in from the cold by his CIA superiors to their London outpost, only to realize that he has not been entirely honest as to a tortured romantic liaison that he went through in Africa.

The Barbenheimer phenomenon — thought of by many as just idle chatter on the internet — has enduring power. Last weekend, Barbie and Oppenheimer earned a combined $511 million in global box office receipts; an unprecedented number where neither film is a superhero picture or a sequel. Barbie made more money, on the grounds that it’s an hour shorter and is PG-13 rated, but the vast box office success of the R-rated Oppenheimer, which made over $170 million in its opening weekend, is testament both to Barbenheimer excitement, and to the film’s very own brand: its powerful writer-director-producer, Christopher Nolan.  James Cameron aside, it is hard to think of any filmmaker who wields such power and influence in contemporary Hollywood.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge must be destroyed before it's too late. The short-bob comedienne fond of wall-breaking and lazy edits has, in very short order, emasculated and destroyed multiple franchises thanks to the overwrought praise for her adaptation of her one-woman show, a descriptor that should itself elicit a bit of vomit in the back of the throat. Not content to politicize Star Wars as an irritating droid in Solo or to chop off the balls of James Bond in Daniel Craig's swan song whose name no one remembers, Waller-Bridge has now set her sights on a firmly American man to take down: Indiana Jones, whose fifth edition box office she will eradicate in spite of all the goodwill of these United States. https://twitter.

The British comedian, actor and author Charlie Higson is famous internationally for being one of the writers that has carried on the mantle of Ian Fleming by writing novels and stories that continue James Bond’s adventures, most recently On His Majesty’s Secret Service, published to coincide with King Charles III’s coronation. Yet in a recent interview with the Sunday Times of London, Higson was openly dismissive of the recent Daniel Craig-starring 007 films. He said “I went to see No Time to Die with my oldest boy, Frank, who is thirty, and he said, ‘That felt like a Bond film made by people who are embarrassed to make a Bond film.’ You had to watch two films in advance to know who such-and-such is and you think, ‘Oh, fuck off with that.