It’s not only the editorial pages of The Washington Post and the approval of US President Donald Trump that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has set his sights on this year. The billionaire and amateur astronaut has also finally wrested creative control of the James Bond franchise from the Broccoli family, who have produced every Bond film since Sean Connery debuted as 007 in 1962’s Dr No.
As a recent Hollywood Reporter article noted, much like Elliot Carver, the tech tycoon villain with global domination ambitions played by Jonathan Pryce in the 1997 Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, Bezos “now controls one of the world’s largest tech companies, one of the world’s largest streaming services in Prime Video, one of the world’s pre-eminent news organisations and even a company sending rockets into space and satellites into orbit, Blue Origin”.
He also owns James Bond and all the previously unimagined possibilities that his new acquisition provides for potentially billions of dollars in new profits. Diehard fans of the franchise may be rightfully worried that Amazon’s takeover of the creative reins of the franchise could dilute the globe-trotting spy’s brand beyond recognition. It could destroy the legacy of a series of films that have been made more in the vein of adventurous, big budget, independent films than studio franchise properties.
The Bond deal represents yet another example of the incredible amounts of money companies are willing to pay for existing, bankable intellectual property (IP) so they can milk it for potentially lucrative new profits.
In 2012 George Lucas sold the rights to Star Wars to Disney, which has trundled out a series of overhyped, not always satisfying, new films series and animated spin-offs that have divided old and newer generations of fans. Disney’s ownership of the Marvel Comics Universe has also resulted in an overload of content that many devotees consider to be of hit-or-miss quality.
A recent BBC report floated the idea that Bezos and Amazon may look to tinker with the Bond franchise to take it “in a direction that appeals more to a younger audience as well as an American market, which is culturally slightly cooler on the Bond brand than the UK”. If Amazon were to use its new creative licence in a similar vein to Disney’s approach to Star Wars that could mean that we would soon have to be subjected to films or series that take us back to the youth of James Bond and his battles against the nasty sons of Russian oligarchs on the fields of Eton.
While some commentators may think that spin-off series about the life of M, Q or Miss Moneypenny offer exciting new opportunities for the broadening of the Bondiverse, I’m not convinced that such excessive expansion of the empire would do much more than leave fans drowning in too much 007 content. You can be sure that Bezos’ eyes are even more full of dollar signs than usual as he contemplates all the tie-in product potential that total control of Bond might give him. Every extension of the franchise offers the potential for new action figures and luxury brand accruements that Amazon will ship to your door within days, and that’s before we get to the profit potential of Bond theme parks.
As Lightshed analyst Richard Greenfield told The Hollywood Reporter, “Cementing Bond could pay for this transaction multiple times over in success … Can they make Bond the next Marvel? Who knows? Bond has always been so tightly controlled. Sporadic movies, there’s never been a TV series, there isn’t a theme park world built around it. How can you create the world of Bond?”
The possibilities are endless, even if they may make Bond fans want to scream to end the madness. If recent complaints that there have been no new Bond films since 2019 are a sign that Bond fans are demanding more, and more regular, Bond, Amazon is about to give them more than they ever knew they needed or make them realise that sometimes you should be careful what you whinge for.
Now that Bezos has grabbed control of the franchise, there’s little else apparently left in the way of legacy IP on the market for anyone else, but you can be sure that other companies are getting ready to make big plays for the content they’ve spent eye-watering sums of money to acquire. Warner Bros is getting ready to launch a global publicity juggernaut behind the DC Universe’s make-or-break relaunch of Superman later this year. Disney is so desperate to have a piece of Australian children’s show Bluey — which it distributes but doesn’t own — that it is putting millions behind the first Bluey film and Netflix is getting ready to make some serious money from its 2021 acquisition of the rights to all of Roald Dahl’s characters.
If you want a franchise to make returns on investment, you need it to generate regular product so it doesn’t fade into irrelevance, but you also have to ensure that it doesn’t become, as The Hollywood Reporter warns, “overexposed to the point of consumer indifference”.
It may, unfortunately, now be up to Bezos, Jeff Bezos, to demonstrate how to navigate such an apparently impossible tightrope.
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