James Bond Producers Tease New Trajectory for Franchise

No Time To Die ended Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond, and the franchise’s producers are now in search of the next actor to play the iconic spy. Bond producer Barbara Broccoli recently revealed that they have a few names that they want to reach out to, like Idris Elba, and that they want the next actor to agree to play the character for the next ten years. Now, Broccoli and producer Michael G. Wilson have revealed in a new interview with Empire Magazine that the next film in the franchise will go in a completely different direction.

“When you change the actor you have to reimagine the direction the film’s gonna go in. When you hire an actor, you’re hoping you’re going to spend a decade at least with them and make four or five or six films with them. So you have to think through, ‘what is the trajectory? What is that actor going to bring? How are you going to move the series into another direction?’” Broccoli told the magazine. “It’s not just flicking through Spotlight and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a guy who’s 6’1″‘ We’re going to take our time. We want to get a sense of where we want to go with the series and we want to do that before we bring anybody else on. We’ll start the process probably with [writers] Rob [Wade] and Neil [Purvis] and we’ll see where we go!”

Craig’s final James Bond movie gives him the type of send-off that not many actors get in a role like this. During the final moments of No Time To Die, we see James Bond’s final moment as he dies to protect his daughter. You would think that the idea of the super spy’s death would be a new one, but as it turns out, Craig wanted this to happen since the first movie in the series, Casino Royale. In a recent interview with Variety, the actor detailed how he doesn’t like contracts and how he wanted his characters fate to be definite. 

“I’m going to tell a story here, whether or not anybody remembers it or agrees with it. But it was 2006,” Craig told the trade. “[Producer] Barbara [Broccoli] and I were sitting in the back of a car driving away from the Berlin premiere of Casino Royale. Everything was going well. People liked the movie. And it looked like I was gonna get a chance to make at least another movie. I said to Barbara, ‘How many of these movies do I have to make?’ Because I don’t really look at contracts or any of those things. And she said, ‘Four,’ and I went, ‘Oh, okay. Can I kill him off in the last one?’ And she didn’t pause. She said, ‘Yes.’ So I struck a deal with her back then and said, ‘That’s the way I’d like it to go.’ It’s the only way I could see for myself to end it all and to make it like that was my tenure, someone else could come and take over. She stuck to her guns.”

Bond Producer Barbara Broccoli previously told Deadline that there’s no front runner yet, because no one is in the running. They’re still very early in scripting out the next 007 iteration. Besides the fact that they only want men playing the character, there are a ton of avenues for the team to explore. 

“Nobody’s in the running,” Broccoli recently said about the next Bond star. “We’re working out where to go with him, we’re talking that through. There isn’t a script and we can’t come up with one until we decide how we’re going to approach the next film because, really, it’s a reinvention of Bond. We’re reinventing who he is and that takes time. I’d say that filming is at least two years away.”

What do you think about James Bond going into a new trajectory? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below or by hitting our writer up @NateBrail on Twitter!