EXCLUSIVE: Barbara Broccoli began making the calls Thursday, London time, to her most frequent and trusted collaborators to tell them news would soon ricochet around the world like a bullet fired from a Walter PPK, the only weapon used by every actor to play James Bond in the Eon film franchise.
The message Broccoli relayed was that she and her producing partner Michael G. Wilson have relinquished creative control of all things 007.
One recipient who received the Broccoli phone call likened it to receiving a call “about a death in the family.”
“Perhaps,” one of several people Deadline contacted said, and not in jest, “I do think that it’s possible that if God had sent us a totally no-brainer Bond in the last couple of years, then it might be a different situation.”
Another told Deadline that Broccoli was “calm” and seemed “resigned” to what she and her partner and half-brother Wilson had signed away to Amazon MGM Studios.
“You could tell she was upset though,” they said. “She sighed, said what she had to say about the impending announcement, and then we chatted about other stuff.”
(L-R) Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig in 2022
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
“Maybe it must be kind of enjoyable to be free of the kind of struggle,” one opined.
“Rather, I think that that’s the positive side to it. I think the reality is that you wouldn’t really want to hand over the family jewels to someone else when you … It’s obviously a massive decision, but I suppose you could say that it’s a natural point with the retirement of a Bond of an active Bond and the retirement of Michael who has been in, or what do you say, stepping back. But I mean basically him leaving the stage and then also the need to find a new Bond. Those things make it, and then this whole change of circumstances are just, they all add up together.”
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This reporter has had relationships with members of the Bond “family” from all departments on the call sheet stretching back decades, and never have they sounded so forlorn. “It’s big, isn’t it? It’s really big. It all feels very big at this time when we’ve got all this bad stuff happening in the world and we want James Bond,” one said.
“I think it does feel like a bit of an end of an era. I mean, it is an end of an era and because it’s literally that thing that’s been built from relationships. And how does that operate in this sort of world that we’re in now?
“It’s all very well Amazon taking over but the thing is they need a producer and I mean a producer in the sense of a ringmaster, it really does need someone with a big sense of how Bond works. The scale is enormous, that’s why it took, in the past, so long to put all the different parts together. And creative producers are not two-a-penny. So it’s difficult. Two pairs of shoes to fill. And there’s the casting, the casting in the past has been exceptional. And that comes from the top,” another source said, because Broccoli was able to persuade people.
“And Michael backed her,” they said.
“He backed her and she very much was the driving force of casting Daniel [Craig]. And that wouldn’t have happened under a committee.
“How do you have someone with such a strong confidence to rebuild something with a vision when you are in that kind of world, a different world,” added another.
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“Assembling the great production crews, you know, production designers, the … well, everything. It was like a giant puzzle and each piece was placed by a master and the whole thing has been built up over all these years through a kind of family ethos and an incredible kind of trust in finding people that they trust and then backing them and building family,” another close associate told us. “And that’s how this incredible thing has been maintained. And so that’s very difficult to … how do you replicate that? That’s the question.”
Daniel Craig, third from right, introduces ‘No Time To Die’ at its 2021 world premiere in London. Barbara Broccoli is far right.
Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Had the search for a new Bond been successful, as mentioned earlier, might that have given Broccoli strength to continue as the driving force, I asked several sources.
“Well, Michael was going to step back. Barbara said as much at the premiere of No Time to Die. If she’d had found another actor with all the right factors, then maybe. You never know. But remember, Barbara couldn’t see herself working without her family. There’s class and there’s class. There’s also family, and they [Amazon MGM] are not family.”
After Craig bowed out of the franchise, Broccoli did meet with a few actors.
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However, one source dismissed that they were ever seriously in the running and explained that such meetings with the likes of Aaron Taylor-Johnson were “just as kind of an ongoing, keeping your eye out on who’s around, but keeping in touch. But I definitely don’t think that there was any frontrunner. They wanted to know what they wanted to do next before they thought of the right person for it.”
They continued: “It’s sort of chicken and egg, isn’t it? And if there was a blindingly obvious new guy, it might be a different situation.”
The ‘No Time to Die’ world premiere in London
Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Thy added: ”I think it is such a pivot point after a very specific kind of direction for the Bond movies, and then what do you do next? And it’s so tied up with who’s going to play the part and what’s the tone. And then, so all of those things are massive decisions. And so I think that’s a huge new journey to start on, which is going to have to happen with the new management. But when you produce a Spectre, a Skyfall or a No Time to Die, these things just don’t happen. They were the gold standard, and what’s the price of gold now?”
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Questioned on what possible Bond spinoffs might emerge, one source offered caution. “It’s not that massive a group of people in the Bond world, you know, the characters Ian Fleming created. I say, ’There is a long way to go.’ And it will be interesting to see how it pans out. But, I have to ask: Do Bond fans want their Bond experience diluted?”
Just don’t shake it up and stir it too much, otherwise the whole thing will shatter.