Comment by Mountain_Skies
2 days ago
Seems to be more than just bean counting. Rings of Power was showered with money, so there are properties Amazon is willing to spend lavish amounts of money on. They also boosted the budget when they took over The Expanse, though there's plenty of disagreement over if that netted a better result or not.
The money wasn't the issue though, it was the lack of respect for the established cannon / materials and most fans / viewers not connecting with it.
Bond doesn't really have a deep canon. They long ago moved on from the source material, and the first 20 movies were connected only in the loosest sense. For Craig's movies they tried to make a cross-movie continuity, but it didn't really work and required some retconning.
But the movies do have a unique sort of character and consistency that is widely believed to be due to one family running the show for 60+ years. I'm not sure that be replicated with a data-driven, committee-based approach. I also believe it was Broccoli's veto power that prevented over-saturation, and direct-to-streaming releases.
My guess is it will be closer to Star Wars than Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time. Some of the movies may be "good" and some may be "bad", but they'll be missing that bit that made them special.
Yeah. Not all Bond movies were good, but they were at least rare which made them feel special.
Now? Oh boy. Amazon did not buy this franchise to turn out three movies a decade, that's for sure.
I promise there will be a James Bond streaming series, and probably multiple James Bond streaming series. And there will be spinoffs. Ever wonder what Q does when he's not making gadgets for Bond? You're going to find out in his own series. How about Miss Moneypenny? Oh yeah. Another important load-bearing column in the James Bond Cinematic/Streaming Universe. It's absolutely going to be a Star Wars / Marvel kind of thing.
I hate it, even though... if we're honest, it's not like Bond was some highbrow thing. Most of the movies were fun, but few were what people would really think of as "great." Nearly all of them had a camp factor between "moderately high" and "very high." But still.
> My guess is it will be closer to Star Wars
I mourn about what's become of Star Wars.
A web host / grocery store has no taste and should not be disrupting the entertainment industry.
It's time that we start trust busting these trillion dollar giants. Amazon needs a break up.
It's totally unfair that they subsidized all of that using unrelated business unit profit, displayed marquees on Amazon boxes and on the side of their delivery vans, and shipped all of our production crew jobs over to developing economies. US film production is in shambles because of Amazon.
I don't see a monopolistic hold on the media from Amazon that would justify this. Anyone can produce content and put it out there. I agree they're not a good steward and they pretty much ruin franchises, but their right to do it is just that. Now if there is evidence that they're taking a substantial amount of business away from everyone else and you can prove they have a controlling hold on it, i'm with you on breaking it up.