Let's talk James Bond. Daniel Craig, who theoretically is signed on for a fifth Bond film, has stated that he never wants to play the character again. Spectre may or may not be his last film as Bond. Assuming he is out, we will once again get a new OO7, a fact that has caused some degree of speculation on the internet. The internet has told us that a fan favorite for OO7 is Idris Elba. I personally know nobody who wants to see Idris Elba as Bond, but the internet says it so it must be true, right?
Actually, there are people who want Elba to play Bond. You see them in the comments section of almost any article decrying the fact that he won't be Bond. Apparently, the rumored front runner is Damien Lewis of Homeland. I personally remember a time when the rumored front-runner to replace Roger Moore was Tristan Rogers and we got Timothy Dalton instead. So I suspect that none of the rumored front runners--Elba and Lewis included--will be OO7 and it will once again be the person we least suspect. Literally there are only two times a Bond actor was played by someone we expected and it took both of them years to get the part. I refer to Roger Moore (who was supposed to do it in 1962) and Pierce Brosnan (who was also supposed to suceed Moore).
Bond is an industry. He's been on the screen for 53 years now, played by six different actors. While each actor brought a little touch here or there to differentiate their version of the character, they all played the same basic character. None of the Bonds are really all that different. Quick: which Bond had a wetsuit with a duck decoy on his head? That was Sean Connery in Goldfinger, not Roger Moore which is what most people might assume. Which Bond threatened to break a woman's arm in order to get information from her? Roger Moore in The Man With the Golden Gun. Sure, Craig is a little angrier than the others and Moore was funnier than the others, but all in all, it's the same character.
The battle cry is that the producers don't want to do something different with the character by hiring Elba. "Bland, James Bland" is the snark going around. Yes, the producers probably don't want to radically change the character. Because if they did, he would cease to be James Bond. All of the major Bond characters to be played by mulitple actors have simply been variations on those characters. There have been four versions of Moneypenny in the series. Outside of giving her a gun and making her black in Skyfall, there isn't a whole lot that is different about Naomie Harris as Moneypenny. She was given more to do in the previous film than Lois Maxwell or Samantha Bond, I'll give you that, but the function of the character is pretty much the same.
The only one to be that radically different is Ben Whislaw's version of Q, and even he does much of the same sort of thing that Desmond Llewelyn did. Spectre isn't the first time Q went into the field to help OO7 out. Whislaw's arguably has more of a sense of humor than his predecessors and is a lot younger, but otherwise, he's Q.
So, outside of skin color, what about Idris Elba's Bond would end up being that different from Sean Connery's? Answer: not much. The times they've tried changing Bond up haven't worked out too well. Remember Timothy Dalton, the safe sex Bond who stuck to one girl per film and whose second movie could have been any action hero? Yes, he quit after the second, but he was unpopular enough that the studio didn't want him to do a third film anyway. Proof of how well a one woman Bond went over was Goldeneye, when he went back to being the James Bond we all knew and had sex with three different women. Even Craig has had more than one girl per film. That may sound crude, but it's true.
There are things about Bond that have become familiar over the last 53 years, things about the character people enjoy. The one-liners (even the bad ones), the gadgets, the promiscuity, and the fact that he's not just any action hero. He's fairly unique among action heroes, actually. The espionage is one of the things that sets him apart. That's the thing people disliked about License to Kill. It's not that it's a bad movie, it's that it's a standard issue revenge flick and that's not James Bond. License to Kill could have starred Arnold Schwarzennegar, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone or any other action hero of the 80s and been basically the same movie.
I'm not saying Idris Elba couldn't play Bond. I'm saying that his Bond isn't going to rock the boat as much as people are expecting. Rocking the boat is not what the producers of the series are looking to do. Even the Craig reboots follow much of the formula the series has established. Why do you think there are so many scenes in them copying earlier Bond films? That's why Gemma Artertron's character in Quantum of Solace meets a fate similar to Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger and the DB-5 keeps showing up. It's called fan service.
Familiarity may breed contempt but it also breeds comfort. People go to these movies knowing what to expect and so long as they get that, the films will continue to suceed. The producers are not going to hire someone who is going to take the character in a wildly different trajectory than he's already been. It's also why you won't see Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino direct a Bond movie. Their movies have a particular stamp on them that is separate from what the franchise has been. Seriously, how many people picture a Tarantino Bond movie as having the main characters dropping F-bomb after F-Bomb? "Pay F-----g attention, OO7" may sound funny to say among friends, but it's not a line anyone would actually want to hear in a Bond movie.
When you do try to radically change an iconic character like Bond, you end up with a disaster of epic proportions. Don't believe me? I submit the case of the 1998 version of Godzilla. It may seem pretty silly to compare Godzilla to Bond, but not really since the two have been in popular culture for roughly the same amount of time. The first Bond adaption, a TV version of Casino Royale, came out the same year the first Godzilla movie was released. That said, the 98 version of the character of Godzilla radically changed practically everything audiences knew about him. Not only did he look totally different from the Toho version (sort of like an over-sized Iguana really), he acted differently. He perched on buildings, had baby Raptors, and was killed by missiles while perching on a bridge. Godzilla does not perch on buildings. He towers over them. He laughs at missiles. And he does not have baby Raptors in Madison Square Garden. Had that movie not been called Godzilla, it may not have drawn the ire that it has. Godzilla fans have a special amount of contempt for that movie. But I submit that had it been called anything else and the monster in it been called anything else, it might have been considered a harmlessly stupid but fun monster on the loose movie. Why do you think Gareth Edwards version strongly resembles the Toho version, right down to the atomic breath, and battles other monsters?
I could also use the New Coke argument where Coca-Cola decided to listen to people who said they should change the formula so they discontinued Coke and introduced New Coke in 1985. New Coke was so poorly received they brought back old Coke as Classic Coke before finally dropping New Coke entirely.
Are the producers wrong? The box office figures would suggest not. Pretty much every Bond movie since Goldeneye has made more money than the one prior to it. People are flocking to see Spectre not because it's radically different but because it's just like classic Bond. Critics are saying that you could swap out Craig for Moore in Spectre and have the same movie. Of course you could. You could also swap out Craig for any of the others and have the same basic movie. But you can do that with most of the Bond movies, at least from Goldfinger on. Seriously, You Only Live Twice has been made three times already in the series, each time with a different Bond: Connery in You Only Live Twice, Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me, and Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies. But look at them: they're the same basic story.
That's why you won't see Idris Elba as Bond. There's no need to make that radical a change to the character. Even if they did give it to Elba, they wouldn't make huge changes to the character. I'm quite certain the producers have an awareness of things like New Coke and the 98 Godzilla and see what happens when you go that far against the grain and have no desire to run that risk. Nor should they. At the end of the day, nobody really wants a New Coke James Bond, even if they say they do. Because if they got that, they'd complain it wasn't the James Bond they grew to know and love over the past 53 years. Didn't think of it in those terms, did you?
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