Who Will Amazon Cast as James Bond?

variety.com:

Katcy Stephan On Thursday morning, Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos posed a question to his X followers: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?” Just one day prior, that inquiry may have felt a bit presumptuous: while Amazon’s $8.5 billion MGM acquisition in 2022 gave it the rights to distribute the Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G.

Wilson had long been the heads of Eon Productions and the franchise’s custodians. That gave them an unprecedented level of artistic command regarding all things 007.

But in the early morning hours before Bezos’ tweet, Amazon MGM Studios announced a new joint venture with Wilson and Broccoli that would give the studio creative control over James Bond. “We now live in a world that we’ve never lived in before with this franchise, and that’s the Broccoli family not having the final creative say,” Fandango director of analytics and Box Office Theory founder/owner Shawn Robbins tells Variety. “This is a new frontier.” In the years following Daniel Craig’s final turn as the charismatic, womanizing superspy in 2021’s “No Time to Die,” Broccoli and Wilson were clear about the parameters of their search for the next Bond: he would be played by a British man young enough to stay in the role for at least 15 years. “The Barbara Broccoli group had a very realistic idea of how the franchise should continue.

In other words: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Bond fits a certain profile, and you don’t want to mess with that too much,” film history lecturer and Bond expert Max Alvarez says, suggesting 41-year-old “Poldark” alum Aidan Turner as a fitting 007. “One of the reasons the series has been hanging on for so long, for so many decades, is that they didn’t mess with the formula too much.”.