Thank you for visiting with us — we hope you enjoy the time you spend here. Be sure to check out some of the links to our friends and colleagues. To contact the webmaster, email here.
IO Interactive said this week its new James Bond video game will be delayed to May 27 from its original release date of March 27.
“007 First Light is our most ambitious project to date,” IO said on a post on X, formerly Twitter.
IO said the delay “allows us to ensure the experience meets the level of quality you players deserve on day one.”
Context: 007 First Light has been in the works for years. Even with the delayed release date, it will still be the first major 007 release since 2021’s No Time to Die.
A GoldenEye video game came out after the 1995 movie. It reached a new generation of fans. If done right, the new video game has the potential to do the same. We’ll see.
Regardless of the delay, the new video game will be out long before the first Bond movie made under Amazon creative control.
The accompanying graphic has been the blog’s annual Christmas/holiday season greeting since 2011. It’s a tradition and things wouldn’t be the same without it.
The past year had the biggest James Bond news in decades. The Broccoli-Wilson clan yielded creative control to Amazon. The family retains an ownership stake. But Amazon will call the shots going forward.
Amazon has named producers, a director and a screenwriter. But we don’t know (really know) much more than that. The saga of Amazon’s first James Bond film will continue into 2026.
Regardless, the graphic used in this post was designed by Paul Baack (1957-2017). It’s just one sample of his artistic handiwork. He designed it when the blog was part of the Her Majesty’s Secret Servant website (1997-2014).
George Lazenby’s Bond is the star of the graphic. Lazenby, 86, has retired from making public appearances. The blog wishes George a continued happy retirement.
To the blog’s readers: Thanks for being here. If you’ve got some time off, enjoy it.
June Lockhart (1925-2025): Veteran character actor. June Lockhart was the daughter of actors. Her father was Gene Lockhart. He played Bob Cratchit in a 1938 version of A Christmas Carol. June appeared (uncredited) in it.
June Lockhart also appeared in The Dove Affair, a first-season episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. She played Miss Taub, a teacher with a group of students touring Europe. Miss Taub gets swept up as Napoleon Solo attempts to complete a difficult assignment.
June Lockhart is most known for her work on television, including Lassie and Lost in Space.
Lee Tamahori (1950-2025): The director who had more than a dozen directing credits, including 2002’s Die Another Day. Tamahori embraced CGI, including a CGI bullet for the gunbarrel for his James Bond film entry.
Patricia Crowley (1933-2025): The actress had a long career, including the pilot for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., where she played a housewife recruited to participate in a mission led by Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn).
She later starred in a TV comedy, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. In one episode, Vaughn and David McCallum appeared as their U.N.C.L.E. characters.
Lalo Schifrin (1932-2025): Schifrin had a long career as a television and movie composer. He is best known for writing the Mission: Impossible theme.
Schifrin was born in Argentina. He made his mark over decades. He enjoyed collaborations with television producer Bruce Geller, including Mission: Impossible, and movie director Don Siegel, including the 1971 movie Dirty Harry. On Nov. 18, 2018, Schifrin received an honorary Oscar for his film work.
In the second season (1965-66) of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Schirfin did a new arrangement of Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for the show. Goldsmith didn’t like it. But the Schifin-arranged version is arguably the most popular version.
As the end of 2025 approaches, the James Bond film franchise recorded its most important event. But there’s enormous uncertainty ahead.
In February, the Broccoli-Wilson family yielded creative control of 007 films to tech giant Amazon. Just a year ago, many Bond fans thought that was unimaginable. But life moves on.
The uncertainty is Bond fandom has no real idea what Amazon is going to do with the franchise.
As noted before, Amazon has appointed new producers (David Heyman and Amy Pascal), a new director (Denis Villeneuve), and a new screenwriter (Steven Knight).
Pascal was once a Sony Pictures executive involved with the release of Bond movies made by Eon Productions, controlled by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. So Pascal has some experience with 007. Villeneuve was once courted by Eon to direct a Bond movie. He had to take a pass because he committed to direct Dune movies.
Villeneuve has worked on a third Dune film. That’s supposed to be released at the end of 2026.
As for Knight, he’s well regarded as a writer. It remains to be seen what he can do with Bond.
Of course, there’s still no Bond actor to succeed Daniel Craig after his 15-year, five-film tenure as Bond.
In December 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported about a deep rift between Eon and Amazon. That was resolved with the February announcement that Amazon gained creative control. The transaction was completed in March.
Various Bond fan groups and individuals spent years developing a relationship with Eon. They are now starting over with Amazon.
The year 2025 was a mix of the dramatic (the Eon-Amazon deal) and the mundane (waiting for Amazon to produce its first Bond film post-Eon).
As ever, we’ll see. The blog’s guess is 2026 will be an eventful year.
Nature abhors a vacuum, the saying goes. When it comes to Amazon Bond 1, that’s especially true.
In 2025, the Broccoli-Wilson clan yielded James Bond film creative control to Amazon (Feb. 20). That deal closed March 24. Amazon hired producers David Heyman and Amy Pascal to oversee its first effort (announced March 25). Amazon named a director (Denis Villeneuve in July) and a writer (Steven Knight in late July).
That’s a lot for one calendar year. But, of course, there’s an appetite for even more.
There have been multiple reports concerning who may or may not play Bond for Amazon Bond 1. In early December, the latest such entry was by Jeff Sneider, who has an entertainment newsletter. Some social media posts describe him as an “insider.”
Sneider’s work is behind a paywall. Comic Book News had a Dec. 2 post that summarized Sneider. The scribe says Callum Turner is director Villeneuve’s preferred choice to play 007 in Amazon Bond 1.
Naturally, various Bond social media accounts have run with this. Again, nature abhors a vacuum.
At this point, we don’t have an actual timeline. How long will Villeneuve be tied up with his third Dune movie? It’s set for a late 2026 release date. The director will have post-production duties.
How long will it take for Knight to come up with a first draft script? How will he work with Villeneuve once that draft is completed?
What input will Heyman and Pascal have for the work that Villeneuve and Knight performed?
Normally, with these “questions” posts, I provide some possible answers. This time, I can’t. There’s a lot of junk out there. In September, Radar Online had a breathless story saying the Amazon Bond 1’s creative team didn’t know how to proceed because Daniel Craig’s Bond was blown to smithereens at the end of 2021’s No Time to Die.
Uh, the first Craig 007 film, 2006’s Casino Royale, was a reboot. It was separate from the first 20 films made by Eon Productions. What’s to stop you from starting over again?
It would appear we’ll have more answers in 2026. Hopefully, Villeneuve will get out from under his third Dune movie duties. Hopefully, writer Knight can figure out how his script should proceed. If he can’t, perhaps another writer gets hired.
Until then, as said before, nature abhors a vacuum.
Meanwhile, here’s a YouTube video from David Leigh of The James Bond Dossier. It’s entertaining.
Heritage Auctions image of a Syd Cain drawing for GoldenEye
h/t Stingray_travel at X/Twitter
Some James Bond items have shown up for sale at the website of Heritage Auctions.
Lot No. 38381 includes an illustration by Syd Cain that shows a “train crash in a mountain area accomplished in graphite and charcoal on white 11.5″ x 16.5″ paper.” The description by Heritage says, “The train storyboard artwork was most likely from a first draft that included a high-speed chase involving an Aston Martin and a train.”
That illustration was signed by Cain and dated in 1994 when the movie was in pre-production,
Also included in the lot is a sketch by Cain of potential GoldenEye gadgets. The illustration also is signed by Cain.
Besides his GoldenEye work, Cain was art director on Dr. No and From Russia With Love; production designer on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; and supervising art director on Live And Let Die. He died in 2011 at the age of 93.
Also up for auction is Lot 38380. That includes some storyboard illustrations for 1983’s Octopussy. Heritage describes it this way: “Original group of (3) storyboards accomplished in graphite on paper depicting scenes from the Nene Valley Railway chase scene, including (1) displaying James Bond’s (Roger Moore) car screeching towards a rail crossing with sparks flying, (1) of an armored truck on the side of the road, and (1) close-up of sparks flying out from the car in the first storyboard.”
The starting bid for the lots (as of this writing) is $500.
2006 Ford Mondeo prototype driven by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale
Earlier this week, the blog published a post how former James Bond film producer Barbara Broccoli’s latest passion project, Othello, was scheduled to go into production in 2026.
The blog had multiple posts because, before Amazon gained creative control of the 007 franchise, Othello would delay the next Eon-made Bond film.
After all those posts, I thought I should note that Othello was *finally* scheduled to go before the cameras. It was a kind of epilogue.
Readers didn’t agree.
On social media, the post drew comments such as: “Please stick to the business at hand.” Or “She has moved on.”
Barbara Broccoli was the daughter of Eon co-founder Albert R. Broccoli. She spent more than 40 years of her life working full-time on the Eon series. She and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson (who spent more than 50 years working full-time on the franchise), retain an ownership stake but Amazon calls the shots going forward.
Regardless, she’s yesterday’s news. And she’s not popular with a portion of the Bond movie fanbase.
In 2006’s Casino Royale, typically depicted as a popular and critical success, there was an element fans didn’t like. That was the Ford Mondeo that Bond (Daniel Craig) drives in a short sequence. It wasn’t a street-legal car. It was a prototype Ford supplied. For many Bond fans, it was an obvious Ford commercial.
Has Barbara Broccoli become an equivalent of that Mondeo? Maybe it’s too early to tell. But the pushback the blog received about Broccoli’s Othello project suggests it’s possible.
Barbara Broccoli’s long-pending Othello movie is moving ahead, it was announced over the weekend.
The project is based on a 2016 play that set the story in the modern day. A movie version has been kicking around for years.
Now, the movie will begin filming in Qatar in fall 2026, Deadline: Hollywood said, citing a statement. An excerpt:
David Oyelowo, Rachel Brosnahan and Cynthia Erivo are set to star in the film, with Oyelowo also down to direct.
Broccoli announced the news at the three-day Industry Days in Qatar hosted by the Film Committee at Media City Qatar in partnership with the Doha Film Institute, where she was joined on stage by Nicky Bentham and Oyelowo.
There were similar stories about the announcement in Variety and Screen Daily.
The 2016 play had Daniel Craig as Iago. There was no mention of Craig in any of the stories this weekend about the movie.
Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson yielded creative control of James Bond films to Amazon earlier this year. Amazon has hired Denis Villeneuve as director and Steven Knight as writer for its first 007 effort.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of SPECTRE, a James Bond film that had behind-the-scenes turmoil almost (perhaps more so) interesting as the movie itself.
The project was affected by hacks of confidential Sony Corp. material in 2014. Copies of SPECTRE scripts became public as did many memos between Eon Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Sony.
The Gawker website, in a post that has since been deleted, detailed script drafts and the problems of the SPECTRE writing process, based on the hacked material.
Quick summation: Eon and its writers couldn’t figure out how the movie should end. The first two acts were fine. The third? No.
John Logan, who did the final versions of 2012’s Skyfall, pitched an idea for a two-part adventure. So he got hired to start the process. Except, later, star Daniel Craig vetoed the idea. So, SPECTRE, would be (more or less) a stand-alone film.
As Logan worked away, drafts included ideas such as Bill Tanner being a traitor who kills himself while Bond watches. At one point, M was supposed to be a traitor. Except, actor Ralph Fiennes said he wasn’t interested. He’d already been a villain in the Harry Potter movies. So, another character, C, was invented.
And there was “Brofeld.”
In November 2013, Eon and MGM reached a settlement with the estate of Kevin McClory for any rights McClory had. Top of the list: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Eon, as it developed SPECTRE, opted to include Blofeld in what was then called Bond 24.
Except (and you’ve probably figured this is a recurring theme of this post), it couldn’t be the old Blofeld. No, in this movie, it had to be personal. So the 21st century Blofeld evolved into Bond’s foster brother who held a really big grudge.
At one point, Eon called for help. Scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who weren’t supposed to be part of the production, returned to revise Logan’s work. Also, Jez Butterworth, a favorite of director Sam Mendes, did some work. Here’s the final writing credit:
There was also some fun and games. Actor Christoph Waltz was coy about whether he was playing Blofeld. Of course, he was. The movie was called SPECTRE.
For all that, SPECTRE made a fall 2015 release. The first half comes across as mixing traditional Bond film tropes with the more dramatic Daniel Craig style. The second half is more of a mixed bag. Still, it features the closest thing to a traditional Bond movie ending.
Except, that ending would be undone in 2021’s No Time to Die. That’s a discussion for another day.
In the end, SPECTRE earned almost $881 million at the global box office. That was down from Skyfall’s $1.1 billion. The U.S. market fell from more than $300 million for Skyfall to $200 million for SPECTRE. But few complained.
What nobody realized, it would be a six-year wait until the next Bond movie.
GoldenEye, the 17th James Bond film, had a lot riding on it, not the least of which was the future of the 007 franchise.
It had been six years since the previous Bond film, Licence to Kill. A legal fight between Eon Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had kept 007 out of movie theaters. In 1990, Danjaq, the holding company for Eon, was put up for sale, although it never changed hands.
After the dispute was settled, came the business of resuming production of the James Bond film series.
First up was convincing a revamped MGM that Bond was worth continuing.
“The powers-that-be at MGM-UA weren’t as enthusiastic about Bond as we were,” Jeff Kleeman, a former studio executive, said in a 2024 interview of the SpyHards podcast. “There was fear that Bond was old news, that Bond frankly felt like a relic.”
Studio executives had commissioned a market research study about Bond’s popularity in the U.S., he added. “Much to their despair, it came back that essentially every teenage boy in America either said, ‘Who’s James Bond?’ or ‘Oh, I know who that is, that’s that guy our dad likes.’”
The studio opted to proceed, albeit with a modest budget for the time, not quite $50 million. The 1996 movie, The Birdcage (“six people in a room talking”) had a $60 million budget, Kleeman said on the SpyHards podcast.
Timothy Dalton exited the Bond role so a search for a replacement began. Eon boss Albert R. Broccoli selected Pierce Brosnan — originally chosen for The Living Daylights but who lost the part when NBC ordered additional episodes of the Remington Steele series the network had canceled.
Brosnan’s selection would be one of Broccoli’s last major moves. The producer, well into his 80s, underwent heart surgery in the summer of 1994 and turned over the producing duties to his daughter and stepson, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Broccoli himself would only take a presenting credit in the final film.
Various writers were considered. The production team opted to begin pre-production based on a story devised by Michael France.
His 1994 first draft was considerably different than the final film. France’s villain was Augustus Trevelyan, former head of MI6 who had defected to the Soviet Union years earlier. Bond also had a personal grudge against Trevelyan.
Other writers — Jeffrey Caine, Kevin Wade, and Bruce Feirstein — were called in to rework the story. The villain became Alec Trevelyan, formerly 006, and now head of the Janus crime syndicate in post-Cold War Russia. In addition, the final script included a new M (Judi Dench), giving Bond a woman superior. Caine and Feirstein would get the screenplay credit while France only received a “story by” credit.
In the 21st century, many Bond fans assume 007 will always be a financial success. In the mid-1990s, those working behind the scenes didn’t take success for granted.
“Wilson and (Barbara) Broccoli already knew that GoldenEye was a one-shot chance to reintroduce Bond,” John Cork and Bruce Scivally wrote in the 2002 book James Bond: The Legacy. “After Cubby’s operation, they also knew the fate of the film — and James Bond — rested on their shoulders.”
GoldenEye’s crew had new faces to the 007 series. Martin Campbell assumed duties as the movie’s director. Daniel Kleinman became the new title designer. His predecessor, Maurice Binder, had died in 1991. Eric Serra was brought on as composer, delivering a score unlike the traditional John Barry 007 style.
One familiar face, special effects and miniatures expert Derek Meddings, returned. He hadn’t worked on a Bond since 1981’s For Your Eyes Only. GoldenEye would be his last 007 contribution. He died in September 1995, before the film’s release.
In the end, GoldenEye came through, delivering worldwide box office of $352.2 million. Bruce Feirstein, who had done the final rewrites of the script, was hired to write the next installment. Bond was back.
GoldenEye would inspire a video game still well remembered today. A few days before the U.S. premiere was the second, and final, official James Bond fan convention, held in New York City.
For some Bond fans, GoldenEye is one of the best of the 007 films. For others, not so much.
Regardless, GoldenEye was a major event in the history of the Bond film series. Bond had survived a major behind-the-scenes drama. The gentleman agent was ready to take on a new century.
Ironically, 30 years out, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, were ready to bid 007 adieu. While they will retain an ownership interest in the Bond film franchise, they’re being paid off so Amazon will gain full control.
GoldenEye’s 30th anniversary is a mixed bag. The 1995 movie ensured Bond would continue. Almost 30 years later, the cinematic Bond is moving into a new era.
The Spy Command 
