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Hello and welcome back to The Bunker, now over 1,500 episodes old. Have you heard them all yet?

I'm Andrew Harrison. Today, what's going to happen to James Bond? At the end of no time to die back in 2021, we were promised James Bond will return,

which would be a bit of a trick, considering he'd apparently just been killed in a devastating missile attack. Daniel Craig was known to be done with the role, but radio silence on his replacement

gave way to news of deeper problems with the movies. In December, an astonishingly detailed story in the Wall Street Journal

laid bare a deep rift between the Broccoli family,

whose Eon films built the Bond brand,

and Amazon, who bought MGM Studios and thus the rights to release Bond movies

by $8.5 billion in 2022.

The paper described a clash between the fastidious values of bond custodians

Barbara Broccoli and her step-brother Michael Wilson, and an Amazon team more interested in data

and brand spinoffs, some of whom didn't think that womanizing, boozing, sexist bond was a hero at all.

The paper reported that, to friends, Broccoli has

characterized her thoughts on Amazon in this way. These people are fucking idiots. So the announcement

this week that Broccoli and Wilson was seeding creative control to Amazon after all, in a deal

the Guardian valued at $1 billion, came as something of a shock. Reactions ranged from, at least we'll get a movie now, to, well, that's Bond ruined forever.

So what's it likely to be?

Can you even make a real Bond who's true to the essence of the character in today's world

of rancorosexual politics and geopolitical horrors?

...