James Bond could be dead

The James Bond franchise could be dead, according to this preview article in Entertainment Weekly. I alluded to this last week, but MGM is 3.7 billion dollars in debt, and simply can’t afford to make any more movies.

It will likely be years before 007 returns to the screen, thanks to money troubles at MGM, Bond’s longtime studio, which has been up for sale since November. Even Daniel Craig seems to have moved on, signing up for the lead in a different potential franchise, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
The last time the Bond series was put on this sort of “indefinite” hold was back in the early 1990s, after a series of legal battles nearly wrecked the series. It took six years to get it up and running again … “No franchise can afford to be away from screens for that long anymore. You lose too much momentum. Even for Bond, it could be deadly.”

That legal battle refers to who actually owns the character (author Ian Flemming or screenwriter Kevin McClory), and it was how Sony was able to make ‘Never Say Never Again’ in 1983. In the 90‘s Sony tried again, and even approached Mel Gibson to play Bond.

Hopefully MGM will just sell it to another studio. Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino have said they’d love to make these movies, so maybe a new studio could make that a reality. Because I need movies. My teacher used to have a poster of a frog wearing glasses and he said I wouldn’t believe the magical places a book can take me, and the only limits were my imagination, but it turns out my imagination sucks, so I didn’t go anywhere, a little fact that god damn lying frog forgot to mention.