All the James Bond Spin-Offs That Amazon Could Be Working on Right Now
Now that Amazon and Jeff Bezos have pried Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson out of the James Bond franchise, it feels like anything could happen. Bond might travel everywhere by jetpack. Bezos could cast himself as M. Everything is in play.
Let’s start with the obvious ones. The whole MI6 crew are ripe for backstory-fleshing series which show us how they got into the international spying game, and Moneypenny is especially ripe for it: a way into the familiar world through a well-known, gun-competent (we’ll forgive her the bullet in Bond’s shoulder, everyone has a bad day once in a while) agent who is – hold onto your exploding pens, fellas – a woman. It’d be something new that’s right in the pocket of what we already know.
And an exploration of the chicanery at Q branch which sees a new recruit rise from the grad scheme to the hot seat could have legs too.
In the same vein, Lashana Lynch’s Nomi – who inherited Bond’s 007 number in No Time to Die – would be the natural place to start for like an anthology series of 00 adventures following other non-Bond agents in the field. Hey! Maybe we’ll even get something like the spin-off series planned for Jinx from Die Another Day at last! Maybe!
Fans of the short-lived early Nineties James Bond Jr cartoon series might be into a Young Bond series too, a kind of How To Train Your Walther PPK about a teen Bond. There’s lots of Fleming estate-approved novels to work from here too.
There’s also the potential for something which a certain tranche of fans have been pitching for a while: a period version of Bond which places him back in his Cold War milieu. It would, they say, be a way of squaring the more emotionally literate latter-day Bond with one who could take out a KGB spook before popping to Morland of Grosvenor Street to pick up his family-size sack of custom ciggies. Even better, it’s definitely been long enough since we had a straightforward Fleming adaptation (Casino Royale was 2006, and before that Licence to Kill in 1989 had little odds and ends in but was mostly an original story) to return to that well.
A series separate to the main film run set in the Fifties and Sixties going straight through chronologically could work, though then you get the vexed situation of having two James Bond actors. There’s only ever one Batman at a time for a good reason. When you’ve got two, it dilutes the power of both.
In the same flashback style, we could have something following Judi Dench’s M into the service. She’d probably not be up for back-flipping through it herself, but a younger actor climbing the greasy pole of MI6 in the Seventies and Eighties could well be good.
And though I know we’re very much past the purple patch of villain origin stories now, we simply cannot discount a heartbreaking telling of how a sweet young boy with dodgy teeth turned into metal-mouthed cable-chomper Jaws. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t watch it. You absolutely would.
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