BONDIFICATING: Will THE BATMAN affect Bond 26?

This is something of an addendum to my review of The Batman, so if you need a reference, click here.

To boil it down, I did not like The Batman. It felt like a dare to make a movie that was ‘darker’ than the previous live-action movies. It felt a bit too familiar and tired. I wanted something different, but it seems the brains at WB wanted to stick with what worked.

What follows is total speculation, and I will be happy to be proved wrong. 

But watching The Batman, something occurred to me.

What if Bond 26 goes the same route? What if Eon decided to just recycle the Craig template of continuity and keeping it ‘real’?

I am a big fan of Daniel Craig. Casino Royale is my favourite Bond movie. But I do not want the franchise to stay in one lane.

I would personally favor a complete break with the tone and modus operandi of the Craig era.

Not because I dislike Craig, but because variety is the spice of Bond and the franchise could use some kind of circuit breaker so that it can avoid becoming calcified. 

See the transition from Roger Moore's final outing to Timothy Dalton's - Moore had been in the saddle for 12 years. He was very popular, but the producers still made a change. And it gets obscured by how his tenure ended, but Dalton's debut made a lot of money. 

Licence to Kill hit a slump, but I do not think you could argue his run was a failure. If MGM had not had financial difficulties in the early nineties, Dalton could have made a Skyfall-like rebound.

And we do not need to talk about Craig.

The whole point of the franchise is that there is a Bond for everybody - if you want a more serious bent, you have Dalton and Craig. If you want whimsy, you have Moore, Brosnan or Niven. And there are plenty of movies from those actors' tenures which feature these tones. That is what makes it exciting. That is what makes it so durable.

What I am worried about is that that flexibility is in the past, and it is hard to tell what the current field of play is going to be behind the scenes. 

The current duumvirate of Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli is coming to an end, and with MGM’s almost-certain sale to Amazon, anything could happen.

Change is inevitable, but based on how narrow the scope has become for big budget movies - specifically in Hollywood - I fear that the brains behind the next iteration of Bond are not going to try to refresh the concept too much. 

To varying degrees every Bond has been singular - they all have elements that are unique to their era. 

But recent Hollywood hits seem to indicate that audiences are happy with bringing back old things - whether that is the universe-jumping of the last Spider-Man, the next Dr Strange and the Flash movie, or the vague rehashing of The Batman. Only two of those examples have been released, but they were huge hits.

And if this trend continues, Bond 26 might fall into the same endless loop.