Bond will be back…eventually

Coming out of the shadows...at some point: Daniel Craig as James Bond

So Bond 25 is back on track, sort of. A month after Danny Boyle walked away from the project amid “creative differences” (supposedly, killing off Daniel Craig’s Bond to have the character regenerate, Doctor Who-style, as the next Bond, or something like that…), Bond supremos Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli - together with Craig - have this morning announced the appointment of up and coming director Cary Joji Fukunaga to helm the much delayed next instalment in the franchise.

While it’s good to know that Bond 25 has a director again, filming won’t commence until 4 March next year, with a worldwide release date of Valentine’s Day in 2020, according to the official tweet, thus breaking the recent production and release cycle of Bond films opening before Christmas.

While this is unlikely to affect audience interest, the delay in appointing Boyle’s replacement and, rumoured, significant rewrites on the script Boyle had favoured, which reportedly had a strong reflection of current global relations with Russia, will mean that it will be more than four years between the new outing and the last, Spectre.

With Daniel Craig already agitating to leave the role after the last film and its physical demands on him, the fact that today’s announcement is jointly from Craig, Wilson and Broccoli is somewhat significant. Craig will turn 50 just two days before filming begins at Pinewood - 31 years older than the youngest Bond on his opening day (George Lazenby).

41-year-old Fukunaga made his name as director of Season 1 of True Detective, brilliantly working with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as they investigated an occultist murder in the American Deep South. How that translates to James Bond will, obviously, remain to be seen. Plenty of Bond fans have hoped for a return to a director like Martin Campbell, the New Zealander in charge of Pierce Brosnan’s GoldenEye and Craig’s 007 debut, Casino Royale. Others - namely me - had hoped that Sam Mendes could have been persuaded to direct Craig one last time, after his triumphant work on Skyfall and the sadly under-appreciated Spectre.

Mendes was something of a gamble as a Bond director, being steeped in the theatre and with cerebral films like Road To Perdition and American Beauty to his name, rather than a back catalogue of action-adventures. But as he proved, with the Bond franchise having to adjust to competition from both the Mission: Impossible series and the darker Jason Bourne films, Mendes’ approach was perfect. And, with him stepping away after Spectre, he left the door open for a director of similar tone, Christopher Nolan. The mind only boggles as to what a Nolan-directed Bond would be like, if his Batman trilogy is anything to go by.

So, we wait with interest. 14 February, 2020 seems an awful long way away…