Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much? - Critical Drinker - #918

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What is happening with James Bond? Give me the updates.

**Critical Drinker** (0:04)
It's a bit of a mess at the moment. So in a nutshell, it is now been corporatized. The Broccoli family who have been running James Bond on screen ever since the 1960s, and I can't believe I'm saying the word Broccoli in relation to James Bond, but there it is. They, it was originally Albert Broccoli, and then his daughter Barbara took over. And they have, in a way, safeguarded it to some degree. It's debatable how good of a job they did in the Daniel Craig era, but they kept it from becoming too exploited. I think they got a little bit frustrated with dealing with Amazon who had bought over MGM, which ultimately owns the rights to Bond. And so the most recent development is that they have tapped out essentially, and now Amazon have got full creative control over the Bond franchise, and they are already talking about turning it into the next Marvel cinematic universe. Essentially, you are going to have the Bond cinematic universe. So what they want to do is spin-offs of Moneypenny, and can she shuffle files quickly enough to meet her deadlines, and Bond the early years when he was a kid, and we are probably going to have TV shows with all the other double-O agents, with all them getting their own little spin-offs and then having big team-up events. That's what they want to do. It's about exploitation of the IP.
So, that's where we're at now, and it's not a good place to be, sadly. There's a reason that Bond has endured as a franchise and as a character for the past, what, 60 years now, and it's not because he was milked dry by a big money-hungry corporation.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
Well, they did step in and manage to turn around Lord of the Rings in a manner that I think was actually impressive.

**Critical Drinker** (1:48)
I mean, it takes a certain level of skill to destroy something as thoroughly as they did and to blow a billion-dollar show, but they found a way.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
Then run it back on season two.

**Critical Drinker** (2:01)
Yeah, they'll keep going with it because they said they were going to do five seasons and they will just out of pure spite. It in the same way that Disney have managed to absolutely tank Star Wars as a brand, one of the most recognizable IPs in entertainment history. In the space of less than a decade, they've completely and utterly destroyed it. It takes a certain level of skill, but luckily that skill seems to be prevalent in Hollywood these days.

**Chris Williamson** (2:23)
It's great. Well, we saw this recent thing with Bezos stepping in with the Washington Post. You see that he's saying we're going to have more balance, etc. I don't know, maybe we'll start to see some more of that crossover a little bit into the world of Amazon, Amazon Prime.

**Critical Drinker** (2:42)
You might see it. The problem is that Jeff Bezos does not run Amazon Studios.
That is run by a woman called Jennifer Salki. She is the one who's largely responsible for failures like the Rings of Power because she is very much into the message as I talk about in my videos quite a lot. She essentially directed the way that Rings of Power has gone as a show. Even to the point where they had a Tolkien scholar in who was tearing his hair out, saying, no, all of this stuff that you're writing is complete nonsense. This would never happen in Tolkien's world. For his efforts, he was fired. That tells you everything you need to know. Jeff Bezos may well indeed be wanting to restore a bit of balance, which is great, but as long as people like her are actually in charge of their creative output at Amazon Studios, that's not going to change. People like her have to go, sadly.

**Chris Williamson** (3:37)
I was thinking about how Bond seems to have been protected, but as you've suggested, it's one very tightly defined set of boundaries around who it is that's got creative control. As soon as you start to build that out into teams of 150, with a couple of people at top that paid a few million dollars a year, I imagine that your ability to stay true to the source material starts to go out the window.

**Critical Drinker** (4:01)
It absolutely does. As I said earlier, there's a reason that the Bond franchise has been in this cultural mainstay for all the decades that has been around well over half a century.
There's something timeless and consistently appealing about James Bond as a character, and they never lost sight of the fact that he was center stage in everything. It is about Bond. We don't want a money-penny spinoff. We don't want a Q department spinoff or anything like that. You can't franchise Bond because he is the core of everything. He's a character that needs to be used sparingly. One movie every couple of years, don't delve too much into his private life, into his backstory, maintain the mystique, maintain the things that have made characters like him so appealing for so long. That's been the secret to his longevity, and they're going to lose that, I think.