When it comes to Bond’s future, the power lies in the hands of Barbara Broccoli, who inherited the control from her father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and who for 30 years has decided when a new Bond movie can go into production. She has told friends she doesn’t trust algorithm-centric Amazon with a character she helped to mythologize through big-screen storytelling and gut instinct. This fall, she characterized the status of a new movie in dire terms—no script, no story and no new Bond.
To friends, Broccoli has characterized her thoughts on Amazon this way: “These people are f— idiots.”
The two sides are at an impasse: Amazon needs Broccoli to furnish them with ideas for a new Bond movie, but Broccoli doesn’t want to make a new Bond movie with Amazon. The standoff, say people on both sides of the divide, boils down to a clash between the 20th-century Hollywood of big screens and big swings and a new entertainment industry ruled by Silicon Valley firms that prize data, algorithms and streaming subscriptions.
The Broccoli family’s control of James Bond has few comparisons in contemporary Hollywood, where cherished characters are gobbled up by conglomerates eager to exploit them across screens, toy shelves and theme parks. For decades, studio executives have salivated over the chance to do the same with Bond.
Broccoli has complained that Amazon isn’t a good home for Bond, since the company’s core business is selling everything from toilet paper to vacuums—a perspective Amazon executives find unfair. But since she makes the creative calls that come first—script, casting, story—Broccoli can hold Bond hostage from Amazon for as long as she sees fit. In doing so, she quotes a refrain attributed to her father, a film agent who’d sold hair driers before he secured the rights to adapt Ian Fleming’s novels: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”
Before the purchase closed, Amazon executives brainstormed among themselves how Bond could be plugged into their machine. Would Amazon produce a James Bond TV show for its Prime Video service? What about a Moneypenny spinoff? Or a TV spinoff centered on a female 007? Broccoli’s response to such enthusiasm, one friend said, is often the same: Did you read the contract?
Broccoli was irked in one early meeting when Salke referred to James Bond by a dreaded word: “content.” Using such a sterile term, one friend reflected, was like a “death knell” to Broccoli.
