When it comes to cringey musical tributes, nobody does it better than the Oscars. And while that chorus line of tuxedoed 007s pirouetting around the stage during the Academy’s James Bond extravaganza wasn’t quite as jaw-droppingly awkward as some previous song-and-dance fiascos — at least Rob Lowe didn’t turn up to tango with Snow White — there was one small but uncomfortable moment you might have missed.
That’d be when the camera panned into the audience to Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.
The whole reason the Academy decided to devote six full minutes of the ceremony to Bond music was that Broccoli and Wilson were the recipients of this year’s honorary Irving G. Thalberg Oscar, an accolade bestowed upon them in November at the Governors Awards to celebrate the half-siblings’ 30 years of unwavering stewardship over the spy franchise they inherited in 1995 from their father, legendary Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. “Let me tell you, they don’t just produce Bond movies,” one-time Bond Girl Halle Berry gushed about Broccoli and Wilson in her introduction from the podium, “they were the heart and soul of this franchise for decades.”
There was just one small problem: Days before the ceremony, Broccoli and Wilson announced they were selling Bond to Amazon.
It was a bombshell development that caught much of Hollywood — including, clearly, Oscar’s musical producers — by surprise. What could have compelled them to do it? After so many years of fiercely protecting their father’s business — EON Productions, the company that’s been in charge of 007 since the character first swaggered onto the screen in 1962 — why would they decide to unload it? And to Amazon, no less, the sprawling global syndicate run by the bald-headed, rocket-building billionaire Ernst Stavro Bezos? It makes even less sense than the plot of No Time to Die.
More pointedly, what does the sale mean for Bond’s future? Amazon, of course, had purchased MGM, Bond’s longtime home, in 2022 for $8.5 billion, mostly to get its hands on 007 IP and build it into a Marvel-style universe filled with bingeable TV spinoffs. The only things stopping them were Broccoli and Wilson, who had very different ideas for their father’s legacy, as well as a decades-long deal with MGM guaranteeing them creative dominion over all things Bond. But now that they’re out of the picture, Amazon can do whatever it wants. A TV show about Moneypenny? Why not. A prequel about Blofeld’s teenage years? Sure. More 007 game shows? Please no. But anything is possible. Amazon is now free to milk the franchise dry.
“Don’t let anybody else screw it up,” Cubby Broccoli warned his children before he died. “You can screw it up if you want to, but don’t let other people screw it up.”
Barbara, 64, was 2 years old when Dr. No opened in the U.K., and by the time she was a teenager, she was working on her dad’s movies. Michael, 83, took a more circuitous route to the family business, studying law and engineering before officially joining the franchise in 1972 (though he did have an early gig as an extra in 1964’s Goldfinger). The point is, Broccoli and Wilson were practically raised on the 007 soundstage at Pinewood. Bond is in their blood. So, when they inherited their father’s franchise, they took his words to heart.
“For Barbara and Michael, it’s always been franchise first,” says one Bond insider. “Nothing else got in the way.”
When they took it over in the mid-1990s, that franchise was in critical condition. Timothy Dalton’s two Bond films — 1987’s The Living Daylights and 1989’s License to Kill — had bombed. Cubby Broccoli, the man who had, with partner Harry Saltzman, ushered 007 onto the big screen in the 1960s, was dying of heart disease after triple bypass surgery. At the time, there was doubt that another Bond movie would ever get made. But Broccoli and Wilson managed to squeeze $60 million out of the studio to produce GoldenEye, which ended up grossing $356 million worldwide.
The partnership between EON and MGM was a bumpy one during the early Pierce Brosnan era, but the studio chiefs back then — first John Calley, then Frank Mancuso — largely respected Broccoli and Wilson’s wishes, while the new producers learned to occasionally throw their corporate collaborators a bone (like giving in when MGM pushed for the casting of Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in 1999’s The World Is Not Enough). Indeed, over the years, enough trust was built between them that when Broccoli and Wilson came up with the radical idea in 2006 of pushing the reset button on the whole series and starting over with an updated origin story based on Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel, Casino Royale — and casting an unknown named Daniel Craig as the seventh Bond — MGM barely flinched.
Those last five Craig movies turned out to be the most profitable in the franchise’s history, each grossing more than $500 million and one of them — 2012’s Skyfall — becoming the first Bond film to gross more than a billion dollars. Obviously, those numbers were a large part of Amazon’s calculations to buy MGM in 2021— they certainly didn’t spend $8.5 billion for the Pink Panther. Broccoli and Wilson were said to be nervous about the sale of the nearly 100-year-old studio to the 21st century tech conglomerate, but they knew that even under new management they’d retain creative control. Amazon knew that too, but executives there — like Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video, and Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios — apparently believed they could sweet talk the Broccolis into expanding the brand beyond the single Bond film EON had been putting out every two or three years.
As Dr. No himself would put it, that was very foolish.
“We just try to focus on making good pictures, and it takes time, it takes a couple of years,” Wilson said in an interview shortly after MGM’s sale to Amazon was announced, telegraphing to his new owners his unwillingness to put Bond on television. “Putting all that energy into making 10 or 20 hours of a TV show, that’s a big commitment. We’d have to delegate to do that. And we’ve been very reluctant to delegate.”
His half sister expressed it even more bluntly in that interview. “It’s not something we’ve ever wanted to do,” she said.
Still, Amazon had ideas. Sources close to the franchise say the streamer approached the Broccolis with pitches for a TV series based on Moneypenny, the MI6 secretary who’s been batting eyes at Bond since Sean Connery’s days, as well as a show about Bond CIA buddy Felix Leiter, and maybe even something involving a female 007. Predictably, Broccoli and Wilson weren’t interested. There was hope early on at Amazon that former Warner Bros. exec Courtenay Valenti — the daughter of late MPAA boss Jack Valenti, who had come aboard MGM about a year after Amazon bought it, and whom Broccoli was said to have liked — might have some luck loosening up the Bond IP. But not even “the Barbara whisperer,” as Valenti was reportedly called inside Amazon, could sway Cubby’s kids. Relations grew even frostier after a meeting in which Salke reportedly mortified Broccoli by calling Bond “content.” Wilson, meanwhile, was said to be complaining about how he’d been unable to set up meetings with Amazon’s top brass.
Neither Amazon nor EON could be reached for comment on any of the above, but it’s clear that in the three years since Amazon purchased MGM — and the six years since production wrapped on No Time to Die — zero progress had been made in getting 007 back onscreen. There’s no script for the next movie, no director and — most critically — no Bond. Sources say Amazon had suggested a few actors, but none the Broccolis would sign off on. In fact, the only Bond “content” that’s come out of Amazon is Prime’s little-noticed game show 007: Road to a Million, which has proved so underwhelming, not even its host sounds like much of a fan. “I actually thought, ‘Oh wow, I’m getting a James Bond film,’ ” Brian Cox recently explained about how he accidentally accepted the gig. “And then I realized it wasn’t a Bond film but a game show.”
Meanwhile, as the franchise sputtered and stalled, Wilson, nearly 20 years older than Broccoli, decided to retire, leaving Barbara on her own with the Amazonians. The half-siblings (their mother was Dana Natol, Cubby’s second wife) couldn’t be more different. She’s liberal, he’s conservative; her passion is storytelling, he’s more into production engineering. But they had complementary skill sets. And they had absolute trust and faith in each other. “They didn’t always agree,” says a source. “But they had a way of working through to a resolution that they would both stand by. They never tried to do an end run around each other. They were always in it together.”
Wilson’s departure was said to be a big factor in Broccoli’s ultimate decision to walk away from the franchise. After 30 years of Bond movies, she no longer had the stomach or stamina for the endless studio battles or the years-long Bond production marathons, certainly not on her own. And there was no obvious successor — not even Wilson’s son, Greg, who’s been working on the recent films but who, insiders say, wasn’t considered ready to step into his father’s shoes.
In any case, it all came to a head in December, a month after Broccoli and Wilson picked up the Thalberg at the Governors Awards. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published a piece detailing the chilly state of affairs between Amazon and the Broccolis in which Barbara is quoted as telling friends that Amazon executives were “fucking idiots.” Not surprisingly, those choice words did not go over well with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “He read her quote in the Journal and got on the phone and said, ‘I don’t care what it costs, get rid of her,’ ” is how one insider describes what happened, confirming that what Bezos ended up paying for the franchise was close to a billion dollars.
For that kind of money, Broccoli and Wilson must have decided, other people can screw it up all they want.
Amazon has a mixed record when it comes to franchises. It spent a reported billion dollars getting a Lord of the Rings series, Rings of Power, onto its servers, only to end up with a show that nobody, not even Tolkien fans, thought was worth a billion dollars. Same goes for spy thrillers; it spent $300 million on a splashy 2023 drama, Citadel, which earned meh reviews and drew a middling audience.
It’s no wonder, then, that news of Amazon’s takeover was greeted like a death notice by Bond fans, who plastered the internet with “RIP 007” posts following the announcement. Even Dalton got into the act, with the onetime Bond telling the British press that he was “shocked” and “sad” about the sale, though he did add an upbeat note, predicting that Amazon will do its “best to make a lot of money, so hopefully they will make good movies.”
And — who knows? — maybe Amazon will. Because there is an opportunity here, now that Broccoli and Wilson are gone, for the streamer to reinvent an icon that could, truth be told, stand a little reinventing.
The fact is, the very same qualities that made the Broccolis such superb custodians of their father’s legacy are also ones that in some ways have stunted the franchise’s growth. Their iron grip on the series and rigid insistence on total creative control hasn’t always prevented the films from flying off the handle or ballooning into bloated, confusing messes (that bit in Spectre where Bond learns Blofeld is his brother — wasn’t that an Austin Powers plot point?). It also has resulted in some spectacular missed opportunities. Broccoli and Wilson, for instance, could have been a bit more accommodating to Christopher Nolan when he was reportedly sniffing around after Tenet, hinting that he’d be interested in directing a Bond movie. Perhaps it was worth at least considering giving final cut to the guy who reinvented Batman. After all, if his film about the A-bomb could make a billion dollars, imagine what Nolan’s Bond movie could do. (Also, while we’re on the subject, is that Moneypenny spinoff really such a dumb idea? Look at what Max just did with The Penguin.)
But, of course, along with opportunities, there are huge challenges. To begin with, with the Broccolis out of the picture, Amazon will be starting from scratch as it rebuilds one of the largest franchises in the history of cinema. From the beginning, the Bond films have been something of a movable feast, with many of the same people — from casting (Debbie McWilliams) to costuming (Lindy Hemming) to screenwriting (Neal Purvis and Robert Wade cranked out first-draft scripts for the past seven films), along with stunt coordinators, publicists, caterers and others — reassembling to make a 007 movie. “It’s always been like a family,” says one member of the clan. “There are stories about Cubby on the set making pasta for everybody. And it was the same with Barbara and Michael. They became the center of the family. They were always there.”
Whoever ends up cooking pasta on the set of the next Bond movie — and Amazon hasn’t signaled who it’ll pick to produce in place of Broccoli and Wilson — they’ll likely be cooking for an entirely different crew. And that’s a problem. Despite Broccoli’s assessment in the Journal, there are smart people at Amazon with years of experience managing big-budget properties. But there’s nobody there with any institutional memory of how to make a Bond movie. And Bond movies are notoriously difficult to make, with production schedules that stretch for eight months, publicity campaigns that last even longer, and location shoots around the world.
