The American film industry is stuck. Caught in an endless loop of remakes and live action adaptations, no franchise is left to die. Disney is churning out a CGI Moana just ten years after the original animated film debuted. This is Spinal Tap got a sequel forty years later, featuring the same troupe of comedians doing the same schtick from the 80s. Even one of the biggest films of the year, Wicked: For Good, is based off of a pre-established intellectual property and is the second half of the musical’s feature film adaption.
One of the original characters who made the jump from page to screen is, of course, James Bond. After first appearing in publications in 1953, Bond made the jump to cinema just nine years later. Since then, the character has been resurrected by at least six different actors starring in twenty-five different movies.
Hollywood has a hard time letting things die, but they’ve written themselves into a corner. The writing team at Amazon that’s been tasked with once again resurrecting Bond can’t figure out how to bring him back. At the end of No Time to Die, actor Daniel Craig retired his iteration of Bond with a twist ending that killed him. It was shocking – a difficult emotion to elicit from a series that’s been dominating cinemas since the early 1960s. However, the creative choice has now created a problem. A source close to the production claimed:
“Writers are tearing their hair out. Bond didn’t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death – he was blown to pieces on screen. Everyone agrees it was a massive mistake because Bond is supposed to be eternal. They are now stuck trying to find a believable way to resurrect him, and it is proving almost impossible.”
The problem is not that including Bond’s death in the story was bad, it’s that it was permanent. Hollywood, just like the rest of modern culture, is afraid of anything permanent.
The movie studios want Bond back because his name makes a lot of money. He is a legacy franchise, one with an enormous cultural reputation. People will show up to movie theaters just because a film has the “James Bond” name attached to it. They think that they can endlessly resurrect the series despite having no apparent guardrails to maintain quality. Especially after twenty-five films, the need to produce creative stories while ensuring excellence becomes an increasingly difficult task.
Earlier this week, Disney released a trailer for Toy Story 5. The original Toy Story trilogy was considered an excellent movie series with a perfect ending. Then, they announced a fourth movie. Now, a fifth. Regardless of whether or not the movies are good and reasonably entertaining, they have a hard time justifying their own existence. This problem applies to most sequels and live action remakes. It also applies to Bond. Could another Bond movie genuinely justify its own existence?
One of the things that does help justify a piece of media’s existence is a concise conclusion. Death is a powerful storytelling tool because it proves there are stakes. James Bond’s death proves that his story had meaning. The modern approach to storytelling is circular. It doesn’t let franchises end but needlessly keeps them alive. Characters are caught in pointless loops of loss and revival. The stakes are non-existent, so the stories are incapable of carrying any emotional weight. The result is that films that cost millions of dollars are the same kinds of slop found on TikTok.
As a culture, we have to accept that it’s okay to let things end. At a certain point, no intellectual property is immune to being destroyed by endless sequels and spinoffs. We are allowed to move on. We can’t allow big companies to nostalgia-bait us. They dangle familiar characters and settings in front of our eyes, promising the same experiences but only delivering a half-baked substitute.
It’s okay to kill James Bond. It’s okay to preserve that character’s integrity by leaving him in the past. It doesn’t mean we forget about him, but it does mean that we don’t tarnish his value by destroying him with meaningless big-budget action movies. If his story can’t justify its own existence, then he can sit on the shelf for a little while. Americans are artists. They’re creatives, problem solvers, and entrepreneurs. They’re able to write new stories, and in doing so, they preserve the significance of the past.
