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A surprise resolution emerged yesterday morning between Amazon and the Broccoli family—who have long controlled the rights to adapt Ian Fleming‘s 007 novels—ending a standoff that began with Amazon’s $6.5 billion acquisition of MGM Studios in 2022.
At its core, the dispute was “a clash between the 20th-century Hollywood of big screens and big swings and a new entertainment industry ruled by Silicon Valley firms that prize data, algorithms and streaming subscriptions.”
The Broccoli family refused to entrust their James Bond intellectual property (IP) to an “algorithm-centric Amazon”. A previous contractual agreement with MGM Studios promised only theatrical releases of Bond movies, and Amazon had agreed to honor it. However, according to The Wall Street Journal, that did not stop executives from suggesting new ideas:
“Would Amazon produce a James Bond TV show for its Prime Video service? What about a Moneypenny spinoff? Or a TV spinoff centered on a female 007?”
Broccoli reportedly regarded the substance of those questions as a “death knell” for the Bond franchise.
That all changed yesterday: The Broccolis will cede creative control to a new joint venture with Amazon MGM which will house the franchise’s IP rights. Amazon will now control who will play Bond, who will write the next script, and when the film goes into production.
What spurred this change? Those answers will likely emerge through the media over time.
A more important question is, what can this joint venture accomplish that neither the Broccolis or a traditional Hollywood studio could before? With generative artificial intelligence (AI) and internet distribution models reshaping the business of storytelling, the possibilities seem endless. It may be easiest to frame an analysis of the possibilities within the three areas of Amazon’s creative control.
Key Takeaways
The Bond franchise‘s future with Amazon MGM will be shaped less by the creative control of either Amazon or the Broccolis, and more by audiences’ desire to fund and/or create new stories across interactive, multi-format platforms
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Total time reading: 5 minutes
1. The Actor
Shortly after the announcement of the joint venture, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos posted a screenshot of a BBC News story on the deal and asked his 4.3 million followers on Instagram: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?
In the hands of Amazon, there may be multiple answers to that question. Bond could simultaneously exist across movies, TV, games and/or generative AI. The TV proposals, above, imply a plan to fragment the James Bond universe much like Marvel and DC Comics TV and movie universes, where multiple actors play the same superhero exist simultaneously across multiverses (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) or younger and older versions of the same character. It also mirrors how traditional TV studios extend popular shows through character-driven spin-offs.
Whereas in the James Bond franchise, there has always been one actor at a time playing Bond or a supporting character (e.g., Ms. Moneypenny). Also, Deadline reports there is “a slew of Bond villains and women in their own series or features” who are also available.
Theoretically, there are no limits to where Amazon can license the IP. According to The Wall Street Journal, Broccoli “had already turned down TV shows, videogames and at least one tie-in casino before Amazon entered the picture.”
Should Amazon consider Generative AI or gaming, it will encounter layers of complexity that I discussed in “Meta's AI Vision vs. The Art of Storytelling”. One key concern is AI's ability to easily recreate one the voices and/or likenesses of actors, Actor Hank Azaria wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece, “There’s so much of who I am that goes into creating a voice. How can the computer conjure all that?”
These concerns drove Hollywood voice actors and motion capture artists in video games to strike against American video game companies last summer. The technology to reuse a likeness or modify a voice has existed for years, but actors argue that “AI ups the ante because it can scrape more information more efficiently and potentially turn it into a plausible clone of an actor, combine actors’ work or pass as a new, ersatz artist.”
Two bills recently signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom protects both dead performers (granting rights to performers’ estates) and living performers (creating a use case of “reasonable specificity”). Even with a more flexible regime, Amazon faces obstacles to digitally resurrecting past James Bonds—like Sean Connery—or inventing new ones with AI.
2. The Script
The agreement allows Amazon to determine “who will write the next script” for the film. Because the joint venture gives Amazon creative control over the Bond IP, development across TV shows, games and movies seems inevitable. Generative AI offerings seem both possible—given the technology’s infancy—and speculative.
Scripts for a film versus a TV show or game are different end-products. A film has a single script developed by a single screenwriter, whereas TV shows require multiple scripts—typically eight to ten episodes per season in the streaming era—developed by a writing staff.
In gaming, there are no scripts. According to a Reddit post from a writer/designer of blockbuster (“AAA”) games, a team of writers start with “broad narrative conceits that (hopefully) have something to do with the game's planned genre, setting, and gameplay loop/mechanics.” He describes good writers in games as “those who are able to piece together a coherent story as the development process inevitably brutalizes their work.”
In generative AI, there also are no scripts, only the instructions a user enters into text-to-video prompts. My recent essays suggest two possible paths for the Bond IP.
Fable Simulation's Showrunner platform blends gaming and streaming models. The platform lets consumers create personalized TV animated episodes by entering text parameters for world, character, genre, and mood. The “script” is generated by AI based on a text-to-video prompt. An animated Bond property using this technology could be more lucrative than a traditional TV series on Amazon Prime Video.
Meta presents another compelling destination for James Bond IP in AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently argued that “individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of [generative AI].” Only certain premium content from books, TV and movies will be “really important and valuable” and result in partnerships. His framing suggests Meta AI will enable creators and “hundreds of millions of small businesses” to use beloved characters from valuable IP like Bond in advertising and original, AI-generated content.
3. Film vs. Other Formats
If we believe yesterday’s press coverage, Amazon will begin production on its next Bond film after it makes two decisions: choosing the next James Bond actor and approving the script. A theatrical release makes sense: The last five Bond movies starring Daniel Craig grossed over $1 billion, with 2012’s “Skyfall” alone earning $300 million.
However, the universe-building potential of the Bond IP suggests that may be the wrong takeaway. The internet as a medium favors multiple content models, as I argued in “Ben Affleck, Marshall McLuhan & The New Business of Living Room Content”. Traditional movies and TV shows are becoming “less bankable products” as content supply evolves within internet distribution models.
If Amazon indeed aims to build a universe where they can monetize IP in theatres and on Amazon, they are still competing against YouTube. They must solve for the “new business of living room content“, where ”YouTube is proving that consumers‘ ’choice and control’ over the medium of the internet means fans are the producers of the content they want to watch.”
Netflix seems pressured by this dynamic to produce more content at lower costs, potentially forcing them “to break [the business]" and undermine their studio model. Amazon Prime Video faces similar challenges at a smaller scale: It captures 40% of the monthly TV viewing in the U.S., according to Nielsen’s most recent The Gauge—and with a smaller user base worldwide (200 million Prime subscribers to Netflix’s 300 million).
Bond & The New Business of Living Room Content
It may be no accident that Bezos immediately turned to social media to crowdsource the next Bond. Amazon seems to have realized “the message of the internet medium” is the blurring of lines between fans as consumers and fans as producers. Consumer “investment” in content has evolved from emotional to financial engagement—YouTube’s Partner Program is driving this shift across 3 million-plus creators and hundreds of millions of televisions worldwide—“so supply must evolve, too.”
Amazon may envision the Bond franchise as *the* catalyst for a broader supply-side paradigm shift across movies, TV, games and/or generative AI. This would contrasts starkly with the Broccolis’ tradition of “big-screen storytelling and gut instinct.”
The Amazon-Broccoli joint venture may enable Bond to transcend legacy media business models by embracing audiences desire to fund and/or create their own content with the hero, his allies, and his villains. Amazon MGM’s creative vision for Bond will be secondary to audiences’ imaginations and wallets.