Amazon is buying MGM. And along with it, James Bond. But James Bond is a character. Ian Fleming’s novels are copyrighted, but I didn’t think you could copyright a character. Sherlock Holmes has been done to death. If I had a hundred million bucks, why couldn’t I produce my own James Bond movie with an original story?
Sherlock Holmes is out of copyright and in the public domain. James Bond isn’t. When Ian Fleming has been dead 75 years (or whatever the law says) you can make your James Bond movie without licensing the rights from his estate. Characters are part and parcel with the original stories. You can’t just take part (a character) of a copyrighted book and call it original by building another story around it.
In general, a character would be protected as a trademark, while the work the character appears in would be copyrighted. But there’s a lot of overlap and of course, differences in international law.
An interesting 2017 article includes:
https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/protection-of-fictional-characters.html
An example of how messy and complex this can get: