It was apparently Jeff Bezos who sanctioned the near-billion dollar spend, to take creative control of the James Bond saga from Barbara Broccoli.
The shockwaves continue from the news last month that Amazon MGM Studios has taken full creative control of the James Bond saga.
It brokered a deal, reportedly at a cost of $1bn, to buy out long time James Bond overseers and producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson. A joint venture has been set up that keeps Broccoli and Wilson as stakeholders in the saga, but – for the first time in history – someone with the surname Broccoli will not have any creative control over the James Bond franchise.
A new, detailed piece at The Hollywood Reporter appears to have identified a turning point, and the finger is being directed at an article in the Wall Street Journal that appeared just before Christmas.
It’s important to note that neither Amazon nor Barbara Broccoli has gone on record here, but the Wall Street Journal piece suggested that relations were not good. Barbara Broccoli was reported as telling friends that Amazon executives were “clucking idiots”, or certainly something that rhymes with that.
And that quote, reckons The Hollywood Reporter, went under the nose of Amazon founded and chief, Jeff Bezos, at the end of last year. Jeff was not happy.
Jeff Bezos, recently the person who changed the opinion pages at The Washington Post to include less opinion, allegedly got on the phone after reading Broccoli’s also-alleged quote, and uttered the words: “I don’t care what it costs, get rid of her”.
Which clearly happened.
Well, if we’re believing this particular narrative, it costs a billion dollars. It’s money that means Amazon can pursue a new film and the assorted spin-offs it had apparently been interested in asking, with one example being a Miss Moneypenny TV series. Again, no confirmation there, but it now doesn’t need to convince anyone but itself that it’d be a good idea to do that.
The full piece at The Hollywood Reporter is here. Worth a read, too.
James Bond will return. And everyone else, by the sounds of it…
—Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
