James Bond was at the center of the 2025 Academy Awards, and in a somewhat curious way.
In a musical number, Lisa de Blackpink, Doja Cat and Raye sang the songs of Bond “Live and Let Die”, “Diamonds Are Forever” and “Skyfall”, respectively. No Bond movie has been nominated for an award, and none of these singers has a connection with the Bond franchise, although they all recently collaborated in the single “Born Again”.
The strange exercise felt less as a celebration and more as a great flashing sign for an icon of the screen whose future has never felt more uncertain.
Since February 20, 2025, the shocking news was announced that Amazon MGM Studios of Jeff Bezos would assume creative control of the James Bond film franchise, commentators and fans have wondered why.
Why the Broccoli family, which for a long time has had the rights of Bond films through its company, eon, would you give the control of the films series to a technological partner with whom they have disagree?
Two possibilities have emerged.
First, Michael G. Wilson of Eon and Barbara Broccoli, stepdaughter and daughter of the legendary producer of Eon Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, may have reached a point of creative exhaustion. There could be something true in this theory. According to Matthew Belloni by Puck, Wilson, 83, and Broccoli, 64, had difficulty determining their next step after “no time to die” of 2021.
A second reason could be Amazon’s impatience. In December 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Barbara Broccoli resisted when Amazon Studios executive, Jennifer Salke, proposed several projects derived from Bond, including a series of Bond with a female protagonist, for Prime Video. Perhaps frustrated with the stagnation, Amazon could have made Wilson and Broccoli an offer that they could not reject to get them out of the way and start the production of Bond content.
Speculation is certainly intriguing. But a more central question should not be overlooked: the “what.”
What exactly is that Amazon MGM acquired? And what can you really do with Bond’s story?
In my research on the 007 franchise, I discovered that this property has never been a traditional series of films.
Long before the launch of “Star Wars” in 1976 and the launch of the Marvel Cinematographic Universe in 2008, Bond depended on a variety of media to tell its story.
The Bond franchise began in 1953, not with a film, but with a novel, “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming. A year later, “Casino Royale” was adapted for American television as a live anthology program. Four years later, in 1958, a popular comic strip of Bond made his debut.
It was not until 1962, with “Dr. No ”, starring Sean Connery, which began the now iconic films series.
Since then, James Bond has become an animated children’s program, books of “Choose your own adventure”, a series of “Young Bond” novels, video games, a reality show, radio dramas and more.
This is what is crucial: with its new agreement, Amazon MGM has a majority participation only in the rights that Eon possesses. Eon has licensed the right to produce Fleming’s future films and television programs since 1961. Eon obtained world marketing rights in 1964 and video game production rights in the early 1990s.
James Bond’s many lives
You may be interested: The sensory and disruptive ‘Carmina Burana’ of Fura dels Baus arrives in Mexico
Other media of 007 – the literary, comics and audio series – are managed by Fleming Estate and Ian Fleming Publications.
James Bond’s media franchise is what I call a network of shared rights and licenses.
No company controls all Bond rights, and no company produces all Bond media. Although this agreement is complicated, the exchange and granting of rights licenses has allowed Bond to arise as a line of lucrative and fruitful products. According to my calculations, it now has more than 330 original stories in 72 years of media production.
In other words, Bond is much more than the 25 films released by Eon.
Until now, the exchange of rights and licenses have ensured that the Bond franchise remains creatively different from “Star Wars” and Marvel.
The companies that produce these series, Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios, are owned by The Walt Disney Company. With their rights grouped under a corporate entity that also supervises all production, “Star Wars” and Marvel have been able to promote high levels of creative consistency and unity among their stories. In cinema, television, comics and video games, “Star Wars” and Marvel aspire to what media specialists call “transmedia narration.”
By sharing the rights, the Bond franchise has reached a very different type of narration, one that fragments the story and multiplies the James Bond that are experienced in different media. The effect is not a transmedia narrative, not even a Multiverse in the style of Marvel. In Bond, the characters cannot cross alternative realities and find other versions of themselves.
James Bond exists in many different worlds and has many different lives.
To name a few: there is the Bond of Fleming novels of the 50s and 60s, which loses its first love, Vesper Lynd, and persecutes its murderers, who are members of Smersh, the murderous arm of the Soviet intelligence agencies. Fleming Bond also is still alive in Kingsley Amis and John Gardner novels, which were published in the 1970s and 1980s.
There is the Bond on Eon’s big screen, who, from 1962 to 2002, never falls in love with Vesper, but loses his wife, Tracy di Vicenzo, at the hands of the crime union Specter and remains marked by the loss. And in the modern era, there is the bond that appears in “Moneypenny Diaries” by author Samantha Weinberg. Published from 2005 to 2008, the series shows a version of Bond that has retired to a small Scottish island with her lover, Miss Moneypenny of the MI6.
The effect of Bond’s shared structure is what I call “wire narration.” The novels present several versions of Bond’s life, at different times in history. The films series creates two of his. The comic series offers even more lives from 007.
Each version of Bond runs along with the others in the market, focusing on a Bond character that only exists within his unique history world. This gives fans an unpredictable canon and constantly expanding stories to continue and even compare, as a great game of detecting the difference over time.
What is the next step for Bond?
The agreement between Amazon MGM and EON is waiting for regulatory approval in the United States and the United Kingdom.
If approved, Amazon MGM will have a solid property in your hands. Throughout the decades, Eon has reinforced certain elements of the character and history: James Bond is an elegant salary murderer. The Chief of the MI6, M, assigns high -risk missions. The Armero of the Mi6 who equips it with the last gadgets. And Bond lives big, enjoying beautiful women, elegant restaurants, Savile Row fashions and omega watches.
It is unlikely that Amazon MGM plays with these Bondian elements. It is also likely that they keep the “Bond Formula” of the films: the image of the gun cannon that starts each film, sequences of loans elaborately designed, specific thematic songs of the film and the closing title card that says: “James Bond will return.”
However, some fans fear that Amazon MGM develops “Woke” stories. Others foresee that the product will be diluted with innumerable series derived from streaming.
For me, the most intriguing possibility is if Amazon will try to create a more unified Bond universe, similar to Marvel’s cinematographic universe. Yes, the Fleming Estate will continue to manage the novels, comics and radio. But with creative control over the rights of EON, Amazon MGM could, in theory, develop an elaborate transmedia strategy never before explored in this franchise.
A series of relaunched films, which perhaps serves as the “Nodriza ship” of Amazon MGM, would feed the satellite series in video games and transmission programs. These games and programs, in turn, would be linked and expanded the universe of films.
If that happened, the Bond franchise would really enter a new phase and run the risk of losing much of the creative flexibility that it has possessed in the past.
With information from The Conversation/Reuters.
Do you like photos and news? Follow us on our Instagram
