Daniel Craig joined the James Bond franchise in 2006 and finished his run as Agent 007 15 years later, with No Time to Die. His critically acclaimed run featured five movies in those 15 years, with one of them considered one of the best in Bond history and one considered among the worst of them all. While he had great success with movies like Casino Royale and saw some lows in Quantum of Solace, he was the only version of James Bond that had a long-running self-contained story that actually had an ending for Bond. Netflix subscribers can now watch Craig’s Bond run, and a surprising movie has become a streaming success.
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While Casino Royale was the best of his run, and No Time to Die was a fitting closure for Daniel Craig’s James Bond, FlixPatrol reveals that it is SPECTRE that is a surprising streaming success on Netflix. At the moment, No Way Home to Die is ranked as the third most-watched movie on Netflix, which is no surprise since that is the film that ended Craig’s run on the character. However, SPECTRE is ranked sixth, above every other James Bond movie.
SPECTRE remains a highly underrated James Bond film. It is the fourth movie in the franchise, following the highly praised Skyfall. SPECTRE brought in Christoph Waltz as Ernst Blofeld and introduced a new twist in their relationship that didn’t exist in previous movies. It was also Sam Mendes’s second Bond movie, which he directed after Skyfall, the only time a director returned to the franchise since Martin Campbell returned to direct Casino Royale after previously directing GoldenEye.
However, while it was a great chapter in James Bond’s story, it received a lukewarm reception from critics, who only awarded it a 63% Rotten Tomatoes score. Fans were also not all sold on the film, awarding it a 61% score, but many complaints went toward SPECTRE changing the relationship between Bond and Blofeld rather than the actual quality of the film itself, which was pure Bond in the end. Now, thanks to Netflix, people are getting a chance to give the film another look, and a possible reappraisal.
Why Are the James Bond Movies on Netflix?
In a decision that surprised most James Bond fans, all 25 movies were added to Netflix this month. What makes this so shocking is that Amazon is the new owner of the James Bond franchise, acquiring it thanks to its deal to acquire MGM (Metro-Goldwyn Mayer). This means that Amazon had the distribution rights. However, Amazon then followed up and took full creative control from longtime stewards Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.
This makes Amazon letting the James Bond franchise leave its own streaming service, Prime Video, and going to Netflix seem strange. However, there are a lot of reasons this makes sense. Amazon knows that Netflix has a massive subscriber base, and by licensing the James Bond franchise to that streaming service, it works well to remind people why they love Agent 007 so much to begin with. This can only work to increase the character’s popularity and keep it in fans’ minds while Amazon works on the next phase of the movies.
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Image courtesy of Tor Books/Macmillan -
Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme
