At the Venice Film Festival this week, Daniel Craig was asked if James Bond should be rebooted as gay while promoting his new movie Queer. Craig just laughed at the question. He’s smart enough to know there’s no good way for him to answer.
This question itself is a barometer for those asking if Bond can be relevant – or more accurately if he can be profitable – in today’s world. The character’s peak popularity was 60 years ago this month, when Goldfinger was released in theaters and made $125 million, 40 times more than its tiny budget of $3 million!
Compare that to Craig’s final entry, No Time To Die (2021), which lost money.
This isn’t the first time people have questioned Bond’s place in the world. People have been asking if Bond is relevant since 1989’s License to Kill, which flopped when they decided to make him fight drug dealers instead of spies. Since then, nine Bond movies have been released, but only three of them have been universally beloved: GoldenEye (1995), Casino Royale (2006), and Skyfall (2012). And 33 percent on the tomatometer is certifiably rotten.
Bond was of course invented by British World War II veteran Ian Fleming in a series of best-selling books in the 1950s. Film adaptions of the character became even more popular because they made nuclear tensions with Russia seem sexy and glamorous. Those tensions still exist, but they’re embarrassing now.
Beyond that, a longstanding challenge has been how to adapt Bond’s more Don Draper-esque qualities – although we at Townhall generally love his “license to trigger.” In GoldenEye, Moneypenny gently accuses Bond of sexual harassment after decades of the two flirting onscreen. In Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Bond calls smoking a “filthy habit” even though the character goes through 70 cigarettes a day in Casino Royale (1953).
Tomorrow Never Dies is actually the rare instance of a film that’s more relevant today than when it came out. The villain is a media tycoon who manipulates world affairs with fake news to enrich himself, the kind of super-villain we really needed to be saved from four years ago.
If Bond is going to be rebooted is a pretty big “if,” given Hollywood’s endless parade of failed reboots and legacy sequels. To be successful, any new Bond series should be done as a period pieces set in the 1950s, with the production team from Mad Men for maximum authenticity, and adapting only those books that were done badly the first time. Then the films would have to be marketed as explicitly anti-woke, aspiring for the kind of Rotten Tomatoes critic/audience split that Reagan has.
There is no such thing as a financially viable “modern audience” that will pay to see a legacy franchise vandalized with woke dogma. Zoomers don’t even go to the movies.
This is one reason that the foreign market has become so important. For movies to succeed, they have to sell tickets in China, where – oops – depictions of homosexuality on film are outlawed. No wonder Daniel Craig keeps his mouth shut about a gay Bond … even while he’s promoting a movie titled Queer.
Now, the reason that conservatives like us talk about this stuff is because of the axiom “politics is downwind from culture.” When our institutions are hellbent on destroying our cultural legacy, our political stability can’t be far behind. Originally, Bond’s hyper-masculine appeal was a reminder to the world that the British people were:
1) so powerful they created the largest empire in human history
2) so benevolent they gave their conquered subjects their countries back
3) so innovative that those countries were returned almost universally in better condition
When it came to positively shaping the course of history, the 1960s British could irrefutably say nobody does it better.
But no one can say that now. At this point, not only does Brittania not rule the waves, they don’t even rule their own country. Every day, there’s some new jihadist violence in the UK to shock us on social media. No one cares if Bond waits until after-hours to flirt with Moneypenny or smokes fewer than 70 cigarettes a day, but if England’s greatest spy were honestly adapted for the 21st Century, then the opening title sequences would have to swap scantily clad ladies with women in burkas.
And a gay James Bond would be lucky to get out of London alive.