The Wikipedia article I linked to earlier about 00 agents says that Fleming’s novels also mention or feature 006, 008, and 009. The novels by other authors, and the films, include several others.
Sylvia Trench, played by Eunice Gayson, also appeared in an early scene in From Russia, With Love. Then they forgot about her.
Yeah, 3-digit double-ohs have been quite common. N9IWP was asking about numbers beyond 9.
I agree , the drive to have big interlinked backstories these days is fine, but it doesn’t have to be for everything and for james bond it really doesn’t bring much value to the stories .
For sure , familiar characters, some bad guys reappearing mean they dont have to spend much screen time introducing them before getting on with the story.
To try and start to build a consistent universe with rational links between the incarnations of the actor really doesn’t bring anything other than headaches, inconsistencies and limitations.
Regarding a non white male James Bond, I remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Craig being blonde, some people will find anything to get upset over regardless of the things relevance to the movie or story.
The character James Bond has evolved over time and long may it continue.
I think Idris Elba would be an awesome James Bond. I’d like to see that.
People have been wanting Elba as James Bond for ten years. He sure seems to me like he has the acting chops and the screen presence. I’m not sure why they haven’t done it.
Idris Elba is now 49 years old. (Daniel Craig is 53, and he was kinda long in the tooth for the last film.) Kinda late to have him do a run of four, five Bond movies, wouldn’t you think? He’d be older than Roger Moore in A View to a Kill by the time he was finished.
This is the answer… ISTR that they’ve made references to the “double-O” agents as being the small set of SIS agents holding the proverbial “license to kill”. Presumably there’s some fixed number- maybe 001-009 or so, and Bond happens to be 007, but there are eight others as well- IIRC in Octopussy, 009 is the clown who gets murdered toward the beginning.
This is spot on; they keep on making Bond movies, and with each actor, there’s some degree of resetting involved. I don’t recall there being a lot of continuity between say… Connery and Moore, or any of the others. And Craig’s recent Bond is a reboot anyway.
Yeah that boat has sailed unfortunately.
As an actor I think Rege-Jean Page has it all for the role. He could certainly do an ex British naval officer, maybe a slightly rough backstory, ice cold when needed, a little aristocratic, charming , athletic , and there is an established female audience that would not mind seeing him shirtless or more , more often which wnot hurt the box office.
As a bonus the head explosions from the arseholes in the world would be wonderful.
Well, don’t forget (unless you haven’t yet seen NTTD, which would make it difficult to forget something you haven’t seen)
The current 007 in the movie is a Black woman.
Yeah, I was thinking, when I saw the ending:
Damn, Craig REALLY didn’t want to be in any more movies!
And I thought:
Huh, and the new 007 means there won’t be a new “James Bond”. Darn.
But then:
At the end of the credits it said “James Bond will return.”
Huh?
It did? I missed that.
Hmm…
I’d love the awkwardness if they kept to triple digits. “Double-Oh Seven, I’d like to introduce you to Single-Oh Fourteen.”
I think Pierce Brosnan’s 007 is pretty self-contained, too.
One of the Brosnan movies alluded to his dead wife, and Q in Die Another Day gives Bond a new gadget watch and tells him “This will be your 20th” alluding to the previous 19 films.
Die Another Day was chockablock full of references to all the other movies, but nothing cannonically to say that the mini jet or all 20 watches were used by Bond-who-looks-like-Pierce in 19 previously documented adventures. It was fan service easter eggs.
Yes, but as I recall,a key moment of the movie is her asking to relinquish that number to Bond.
Well, that is explained in the shows.
In the comedy Casino Royale, a film with some fabulous moments, it was said that James Bond is a code name, that goes with 007. I like that.
Colin Salmon would have been a pretty good James Bond. I forget if he was a 00 or not.
There’s a Goon Show episode where Neddie Seagoon receives a call from Agent 003162874. (“Ah, premium Bond!”)
Ehh… I don’t think that’s quite the same. Bruce Wayne is a singular fictional character who fights crime as Batman. We can watch a recent Batman movie and maybe debate about whether it’s a reboot or a soft reboot or a sequel or a semi-shared-universe-sequel to a previous Batman movie with a different actor (or, for that matter, to any number of non-movie Batman incarnations), but for the most part, we just accept “here are lots of different stories about ‘the same’ fictional character”, because that’s how comic books work. Same as Sherlock Holmes stories. But it never even crosses our mind that, in universe, at some point “Bruce Wayne” say “OK, I’m done being Bruce Wayne, I retire”, and then another younger guy gets to be “Bruce Wayne” for a while, while the previous Bruce Wayne is still alive, but has gone back to his original birth name, and is off fishing somewhere. That’s (a) nonsensical and (b) unneeded
But with the James Bond movies, due to some combination of:
(a) there are already code names/numbers involved
(b) they are all set in a vaguely specific real-world “the present” (as of when they were made) and date back decades now
(c) Bond never seems to have parents or childhood friends
(d) and other hard-to-quantify characteristics
It may not be NEEDED or ESSENTIAL for all the Bond films to be in a single continuity with “James Bond” being an alias, but it would (a) fit, and (b) be kind of cool.
To put it another way, if in the next James Bond film, if there’s a segment in which someone whose name is very clearly NOT “James Bond” gets inducted into the James-Bond-Alias secret, and gets shown photos of previous James Bonds, and there’s are cameos from Daniel Craig and Pierce Brosnan wishing him well… that would be a pretty cool scene. I’d enjoy it. There are probably some details in a few movies that wouldn’t make sense (I think that we visit the ancestral Bond family home in one movie) but, overall, I’d be like “OK, I’m in for this”.
If a similar scene in a Batman movie involved the new Bruce Wayne being wished luck by Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton, it would be just insanely bizarrely stupid. Batman’s entire thing is his childhood origin story. How could he have that if it’s just an alias?