Bond 25: No Time To Die

[john]

13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Except there doesn't appear to be any appetite for a female bond if you ask audiences. As per the poll I just posted.

They’d go see it if it came out. It’s a Bond movie.

14 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I have no problem with female led movies, and if you wanted to go and do a spin off, with a different character then go ahead. The problem lies when you try and pull apart established characters for no reason other than for perceived political reasons. I can't see much justification for it.

What’s the difference between a female Bond character that acts like Bond and has a backstory that she’s James’ daughter and a female Bond character that acts like Bond and just appears as a new character like all Bonds do?

[Heartofice]

8 minutes ago, john said:

They’d go see it if it came out. It’s a Bond movie.

Doesn't really be much evidence to prove that. But if it makes you happy to think that I won't stop you.

8 minutes ago, john said:

What’s the difference between a female Bond character that acts like Bond and has a backstory that she’s James’ daughter and a female Bond character that acts like Bond and just appears as a new character like all Bonds do?

The difference being that a female James Bond is simply not the same character, at all. Its a fundamental change, much as Rippounet just mentioned. By changing the sex you are making a big shift in who that character is, as much you might think its cosmetic, it really isn't. Therefore if you wanted to create another character who was a bit like Bond, was a spy etc, absolutely no problem with that. 

My argument here is really based on two points:

1 - Making James Bond a woman would be a HUGE change. I'm not sure you accept that, which is where I'm really struggling to see your point of view. So much of Bond's character , good and bad, is based on him being male. It's not as simple as making him a woman and assuming nothing would change.

2 - Such a big change would need strong reasoning and motive, and so far I'm not seeing any. There doesn't appear to be any major advantage to doing so, and there is nothing about his character that suggests it makes any sense. Doctor Who can easily be shifted to being a woman, and I'm totally fine with that, because that is the nature of a Time Lord. You can't just flippantly change a character like Bond and retain its brand values, I already think the franchise has strayed away from it's strengths and is nothing more than a generic, and dull, blockbuster romp.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Why not both? You could do a 005 film and find out she’s Bond’s daughter. You could even have Bond come in from time to time, but essentially you’re establishing a new, separate franchise. If it works, run with it. If not, have it be a one off and it doesn’t do anything to the 007 franchise.  

[Conflicting Thought]

Idk, bond being white is also like a key component of the character, no?, it informs everything about him, and how people react and interact with him. Or his contempt for women, you could also argue that without that misogyny its not really bond, but all of those thing are changing and evolving as the charachter evolves, if his mysogyny and whitness can change and evolve with the times, why not his gender, why is his gender and only his gender the defining quality of bond. 

[Rippounet]

25 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Why not both? You could do a 005 film and find out she’s Bond’s daughter. You could even have Bond come in from time to time, but essentially you’re establishing a new, separate franchise. If it works, run with it. If not, have it be a one off and it doesn’t do anything to the 007 franchise.  

Yeah, that'd be my choice as well.
And I'm quite certain that's what No time to die will attempt: from the trailer we get a female 005 to work with James Bond, with the possibility that she gets her own franchise if the movie is a hit.
I think it's got great potential because you don't need to change James Bond himself... You can even underline the fact that he's misogynistic and the fact that he belongs to the past!

As for James Bond's race, well yes, that is an issue as well, no doubt. I'd argue that Bond's misogyny was always far more pronounced than his racism, but Live and let die (both the book and the movie) is racist to say the least (the use of the "n word" alone would be a huge problem today).

While we're at it, let's remember that the Bond novels also presented unions and leftists as potential Soviet agents, uh?
Bond would probably hate most of us (I know he'd certainly despise me).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Well, to take it back to my original argument, we first need to identify if Bond is a man or an alias. I always wanted it to be the latter, but Skyfall nuked that, and it also nukes having a woman stand in directly for Bond.

[Rhom]

I thought I remembered some scuttlebutt around the time that Die Another Day came out that they were looking at taking Halle Berry's Jinx character as a potential spin off... thank God that got shut down quick!

And everything about Live and Let Die is cringe worthy to modern audiences.  "Someone take this honkey outside and waste him."

[john]

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Doesn't really be much evidence to prove that. But if it makes you happy to think that I won't stop you.

Thanks.  And I won't stop you conducting another survey to find out whether people might possibly want to see a new film in one of the most popular film franchises ever.

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Therefore if you wanted to create another character who was a bit like Bond, was a spy etc, absolutely no problem with that.

Well what if she was exactly the same as Bond? Patriotic, tough, handy in a fight, drinks, smokes, shags around.  Why would being his daughter clear the barrier of acceptabilty but being him (her) not?

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

There doesn't appear to be any major advantage to doing so, and there is nothing about his character that suggests it makes any sense. Doctor Who can easily be shifted to being a woman, and I'm totally fine with that, because that is the nature of a Time Lord.

 It's the nature of Bond too. He changes character every half dozen films.

[mormont]

9 hours ago, Rhom said:

Want a kick ass female spy?  Make one!  In fact, plenty of examples of good characters have already been given. 

It's not an either/or. Both can be and should be done.

9 hours ago, Rhom said:

Here is my long standing argument for diversity and inclusion in film/TV.  To artificially change race or sex just for the sake of being "diverse" is counter productive.  True diversity in Hollywood will only come when it doesn't matter what race the actor is. 

But you're insisting that it does matter what gender an actor is. And in fact, it does matter what race an actor is. Look at the facts. Minority actors don't get put up for lead roles, because most of those roles are written for white men - without, of course, anyone ever admitting, sometimes even noticing, that this is true, because white is the default and nobody notices the default race/gender/sexuality etc. But it's still there. Lead roles are written as straight white men. And as long as that is true. it will always matter.

9 hours ago, Rhom said:

Give me a new character.  I would go see an original spy flick featuring a female lead with a good hook in a heartbeat.  To make her be James Bond tells me that you don't think a woman can carry a movie on her own, she has to be propped up by the reputation of the men who carried the name before.  

I await the list of successful new spy movie franchises led by a male character with bated breath. It must exist. right? Because starting a new successful spy movie franchise is so simple.

[Fez]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

I await the list of successful new spy movie franchises led by a male character with bated breath. It must exist. right? Because starting a new successful spy movie franchise is so simple.

Bourne and Mission Impossible are the obvious examples. There's also the Kingsman series. The xXx series is lower tier certainly, but they're working on a fourth movie now.  Hobbes and Shaw seems certain to get at least one sequel. The continued saga of Jack Ryan could be considered a franchise as well. There's been plenty more one-off movies as well.

James Bond is not the end-all-be-all. 

Also, Vanessa Kirby was far and away the best part of Hobbes and Shaw and the MI movie she was in.

 

[Rippounet]

Maybe Mormont meant to type "female" though...

It's funny, I always saw James Bond as a cheesy character for cheesy movies. His brand was always toxic masculinity or "heteronormativity" as scholars say. As I said earlier, Bond novels in 2020 read like comedy, a caricature of regressive masculinity and conservatism. It's part of what makes Casino Royale (both the book and the movie) interesting, because our super-masculine hero gets kicked in the balls both literally and figuratively (Vesper's "betrayal"). But after that excellent 2005 reboot the franchise didn't exactly know what to do with a main character bordering on the anti-heroic. Bond was always this arch-conservative alcoholic chain-smoker who likes to play cards or golf when he isn't killing Soviet spies. Craig did a commendable job of not making him a sympathetic character, but the lack of humor (and the end of the Cold War) made him just another action movie hero. Perhaps that's why people want a female James Bond, now that he's kinda been adapted to the 21st century.
I wish they'd managed to show how shitty the character always was. I only read about half of these novels because Bond himself is boring and dumb. The guy just keeps running straight into traps and only gets away with it because he gets help and/or because the villains aren't much brighter. At some point it's funnier to see him get his ass kicked than get the girl(s).
I wish they'd found a way to subvert the character without falling into comedy... It would have been great fun to watch Bond be portrayed accurately... Think of all the coughing fits he'd be having everytime he runs after a bad guy for instance...

Anyway, a female James Bond could make sense if you think the franchise is just about action movies now. I think there's something better to be done with the poster child of toxic masculinity, but maybe that ship has sailed and that would be too subtle to make big bucks...
So after all... why not. Maybe making actually good movies (for a change) with a female lead is the best subversion one can hope for in the future. Not the one I would have imagined, but the alternative at this point would probably be to let the whole thing die.

[mormont]

8 hours ago, Fez said:

Bourne and Mission Impossible are the obvious examples. There's also the Kingsman series. The xXx series is lower tier certainly, but they're working on a fourth movie now.  Hobbes and Shaw seems certain to get at least one sequel. The continued saga of Jack Ryan could be considered a franchise as well. There's been plenty more one-off movies as well.

James Bond is not the end-all-be-all.

xXx and Hobbes and Shaw are not spy franchises. One-off movies aren't examples of franchises. MI was a revamp of an existing franchise, Kingsman a comics adaptation, and Bourne and Ryan adaptations of novel series, and so none of those are 'new'. So that's a handful of examples over decades of trying, none of which really qualify. The only successes are properties that already had name recognition for one reason or another. And those, really, are arguments in favour of gender switching: if you need name recognition to be successful, then gender switching an existing property is a better strategy than trying to launch a completely new one.

ETA - I'm not opposed to new female-led franchises, I should reiterate. It's not an either/or. But realistically, if a director or writer is out there pitching such an idea - and I'm positive there are lots of them out there doing just that - it's currently a hard sell. Movie execs are going to be reluctant and even if they agree, they're going to give it a small budget. They want a surefire success, not a gamble, and that goes for all new movie franchises. The above list backs that up. MI, for example, has very little in common with the original but the name recognition probably got it a hearing, at the very least.

Blithely talking about starting new female-led franchises as if such a thing were trivially easy and not extremely difficult may be comforting to people who want to maintain the status quo but also want to believe they're egalitarian. But it's not really a rebuttal of why gender switching might be a good idea.

Final note: last time we had this argument, I asked for some information about what the core attributes of Bond as a character actually are and how they are linked to maleness. Things that have consistently appeared across all of the movies and are intrinsically linked to being a man. The answers were vague and contradictory. The fact is, the key characteristics of Bond films are substantially stuff that goes on around Bond, not necessarily the character of Bond himself. The gadgets. The plots. The villainous organisations. The supporting cast. The Britishness of it. Bond himself has been reinterpreted over and over again. The supposed 'core' of Bond as a character is harder to define than people think.

[Heartofice]

13 minutes ago, mormont said:

xXx and Hobbes and Shaw are not spy franchises. One-off movies aren't examples of franchises. MI was a revamp of an existing franchise, Kingsman a comics adaptation, and Bourne and Ryan adaptations of novel series, and so none of those are 'new'. So that's a handful of examples over decades of trying, none of which really qualify. The only successes are properties that already had name recognition for one reason or another. And those, really, are arguments in favour of gender switching: if you need name recognition to be successful, then gender switching an existing property is a better strategy than trying to launch a completely new one.

Why is success a criteria here? I'm not seeing the logic. What is the actual problem you are trying to solve, because there doesn't seem to be a good answer at all.

Is the problem that there aren't enough opportunities for female leads in action movies? Clearly that isn't true in 2020 where there has been a massive push to make these movies, in fact there are almost too many to comprehend.

There are also successful action movies with female leads, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel for example, Star Wars. Atomic Blonde did ok. 

So my question is also, why the obsession over gender swapping a small sub genre of movies?

 

 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Kingsman a comics adaptation, and Bourne and Ryan adaptations of novel series, and so none of those are 'new'.

This feels like a distraction from the discussion. There are plenty of female spy series in novels and comics. That there's some existing non-film material doesn't strike me as a strike against "new" franchises when James Bond came from novels, MI from television, and so on. Having pre-existing material doesn't gurantee an audience or success at starting a franchise.

 

I mean, are you going to remove from discussion Red Sparrow because it's based on books? Atomic Blonde because it's based on a graphic novel? Both of these very recent female-led spy films have had talks of sequels, by the by.

 

[Raja]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

xXx and Hobbes and Shaw are not spy franchises. One-off movies aren't examples of franchises. MI was a revamp of an existing franchise, Kingsman a comics adaptation, and Bourne and Ryan adaptations of novel series, and so none of those are 'new'. 

And none of those attract the budget or talent that Bond does, even MI which surprised me. Except for MI, I don't think any of the movies that Fez mentioned are even in the same league.

 

 

 

[Ran]

55 minutes ago, Raja said:

And none of those attract the budget that Bond does, even MI which surprised me.

MI3 and Casino Royale, released in the same year, had the same budget. It’s a development of the post-CR era that they have gotten constantly more expensive, with extremely long principal photography schedules, whereas the MI franchise has chosen to keep costs under control. In 2015, Deadline looked at Rogue Nation and Spectre and found that RN had a higher return on investment than Bond, eking out just over $100 million in net profit while Spectre was a little under $100 million. Deadline also had some interesting info on the first-dollar gross deals the Broccolis’ and the Fleming estate have, estimating that the former took in $50 million and the Fleming estate about $10 million from the film.

Anyways, Bond budgets are an outlier, and that seems to have to do with its complicated production history with studios sharing costs and thus seemingly more willing to have higher budgets than they would if producing them independently. But the higher budget doesn’t make them more profitable, just more marketable, basically.

[Heartofice]

Why is the budget even relevant? The target keeps moving here and nobody seems to know what they even want. 

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

Final note: last time we had this argument, I asked for some information about what the core attributes of Bond as a character actually are and how they are linked to maleness.

I'm not sure you see the irony of having such a conversation about James Bond, a character whose core attribute is universally recognised as being toxic masculinity.

All other things aside, pretending that James Bond's gender doesn't matter or that "switching" his gender it is not a big deal, is a spectacularly bad argument. I'm pretty sure that's why Broccoli decided not to use it and why the moviemakers chose to have a female 005 instead of "switching" Bond himself...

 

[john]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Why is the budget even relevant? The target keeps moving here and nobody seems to know what they even want. 

Female James Bond.

33 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

All other things aside, pretending that James Bond's gender doesn't matter or that "switching" his gender it is not a big deal, is a spectacularly bad argument.

That’s not the argument, it’s more like a supporting premise to the argument. If it was a big deal I’d still say do it anyway.

But in any case, it’s not a big deal. I just switched Bond’s gender in my head.  Off she goes on her imaginary adventures. She’s wearing a trendy but conservative pantsuit, she’s drinking a fastidious cocktail, she’s crudely seducing a conventionally attractive man, she’s strangling a Cold War era mercenary with a lamp cord.  Not running into any imaginary problems so far.

 

[Heartofice]

7 minutes ago, john said:

Female James Bond.

And yet there still isn't a coherent reason as to WHY there should be a female James Bond. Where is the lack of representation that needs to be addressed?