Can James Bond Be Licensed to Thrill Again?
With creative control of the franchise shifting after six decades, 007 needs clever, suspenseful storytelling not just gadgets and frenetic action
James Bond has stared down plenty of villains over the years—garden-variety megalomaniacs, faceless henchmen, Soviet killers with weird skills—but his latest mission may be the most unexpected: proving that the espionage genre still has a pulse.
Amazon’s MGM Studios recently completed a deal to take over creative control of the Bond movie franchise from the family of Albert Broccoli, who had produced the films since the first one in 1962. The tech giant now has an opportunity to breathe new life into a stale brand and to remind audiences why they love spy stories in the first place.
Bond’s last on-screen adventure, 2021’s “No Time to Die,” ended with his death. It was a bold choice but also a symbolic announcement that there couldn’t just be endless installments of Bond at it again, with essentially the same cocktail of stunts, explosions and suave one-liners. The franchise, like the genre as a whole, is in definite need of revitalization.
It’s worth remembering a time when a spy thriller could be clever without blowing up half the world. Consider one of my favorite films, “Sneakers” (1992), which stands out as a high-water mark in espionage storytelling. There are no death rays from orbit or armies of faceless goons; the fate of the free world doesn’t hinge on a ticking bomb. Instead, a team of misfits, hackers and former spies—led by Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier—use wit, deception and teamwork to outmaneuver a nemesis with a very personal grudge against the world.
The film’s most intense moments involved cracking codes, sneaking past guards and engaging in cat-and-mouse games of subterfuge. The climax relies not on an explosion but on how smart the team is under pressure. Watching it now, “Sneakers” feels almost revelatory. It achieves so much with storytelling that you don’t miss having CGI.
Modern spy films have largely abandoned this ethos, opting for increasingly elaborate set pieces that drown out the very elements that make the genre not only captivating but culturally and politically important. Bond is a prime example. Over six decades, Britain’s top spy’s adventures transformed from relatively taut Cold War intrigues to grandiose action extravaganzas. Watching a Bond film in recent years often felt like watching a luxury-car commercial or paging through fashion advertisements in Vanity Fair. The budget for “No Time to Die” was reportedly more than $250 million, but somewhere amid the fireballs and IMAX-worthy spectacle the soul of the spy genre slipped from sight.
The decline in espionage storytelling parallels deeper shifts in culture. During Bond’s 1960s heyday, spy fiction thrived on a sense of higher purpose. The conflicts were framed as existential battles of ideologies—democracy vs. communism, good vs. evil. Bond’s early missions, however campy they got, were grounded in the West’s real anxieties about Soviet plots and nuclear Armageddon.
There were exceptions, of course. John le Carré’s novels, which began appearing at the same time as the first Bond movies, depicted less-dashing operatives with more compromised morality. But for the most part, readers and moviegoers accepted the premise that spy agencies were simply defending freedom from its enemies.
After the Cold War, and especially in the wake of modern intelligence scandals, including CIA black sites and NSA mass surveillance, public faith in intelligence agencies eroded. The 1990s and 2000s brought ever-murkier motivations, and spy thrillers lost their ideological clarity.
Hollywood’s spies scrambled to find new villains and new justifications for their exploits. The audience could no longer be certain what our fictional spies truly believed in. Even Bond felt it: In “GoldenEye” (1995), a fellow agent mocks him as a “relic of the Cold War,” and by “Skyfall” (2012), Bond’s boss M is delivering elegies for the old ways while British politicians question whether agents like 007 are still relevant.
Hollywood responded by making spy agencies the bad guys. In the Jason Bourne films, the CIA is often the antagonist. In “Skyfall,” the sins of Bond’s own agency, MI6, create the vengeful figure seeking to destroy it. Bond wasn’t spared—modern films saddled him with trauma and self-doubt.
With moral frameworks crumbling, filmmakers became ever more reliant on spectacle. The “Mission: Impossible” films gave up much of the teamwork and ingenuity of the original 1970s TV series to focus on Tom Cruise jumping from heights or performing unbelievable stunts, with a team of stock characters serving his main-character story line.
There was a brief glimmer of hope after “Casino Royale” in 2006 stripped Bond back to his roots, emphasizing psychological tension over gadgetry. But subsequent films brought back convoluted back stories and narratives leaning more on nostalgia than innovation.
Recent attempts in the spy genre fared no better. Netflix’s “The Gray Man” (2022) is a globe-trotting assassin tale loaded with shootouts and pyrotechnics but utterly missing the soul of espionage. Amazon’s “Citadel” (2023) offered eye candy—beautiful stars in perfectly-tailored outfits, high-tech gadgets and fights atop speeding trains—but forgot to pack the intrigue.
To right the course, we should re-examine the classics that delved more into character, tension and narrative propulsion. Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) has a few bursts of violence, but what we remember is Robert Redford’s everyman researcher evading shadowy assassins in a paranoid atmosphere of mistrust. The film’s most chilling scenes involve phone calls and murmured conversations, the terrifying sense that anyone could be listening or lying.
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946) remains one of the most suspenseful spy films ever made, with hardly a gun fired. Its famous wine-cellar scene, as Gary Grant and Ingrid Bergman risk discovery by Claude Rains, generates white-knuckle tension out of pure timing and circumstance. Less is more in these stories: We care about the characters and the stakes; a whispered exchange or a furtive glance can be as thrilling as a shootout.
That’s why a modern TV series like “Slow Horses,” on Apple TV, has been a refreshing success. It doesn’t rely on saving the world to hold our attention. Instead, it gives us a team of castoff British spies caught up in relatively small-scale intrigue and milks suspense from office politics, personal grudges and the occasional burst of very human heroism.
My greatest hope as a fan of the genre is that Amazon makes room in the Bond “universe” for a story like “Andor,” the “Star Wars” spinoff that dared to treat its audience like adults. It discarded galactic battles for a slow-burn thriller about rebellion, surveillance and power.
This is the model that MGM Studios should emulate for Bond. Amazon gives it the resources to keep 007 as stylish as ever. But what Bond needs most isn’t money but creative talent willing to take the risk of returning to the heart of the genre: secrets, deception, smoldering tension.
The next Bond film or series must prioritize tension over explosions, stakes over CGI. The Aston Martin with the eject button and rocket launcher can stay, but only if the brain behind the wheel matters.
Bradley Hope is the co-founder of the production company Project Brazen and the author, most recently, of “The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime.”
