James Bond: Robert Pattinson Rumors Could Open the Way for a New Status Quo

Ever since Daniel Craig left the role in 2021’s No Time to Die, we’ve all been wondering who will be the next James Bond. Turns out, we may not have been asking the right question. The real question may be: how will the next James Bond story be told? Will it be a series of stand-alone adventures, as has been the case before the Craig era? Or will modern blockbuster standards demand that Bond continue the ongoing continuity established by Craig’s movies?

We may be getting an answer to both questions at once. According to the latest newsletter from insider Matthew Belloni, Amazon/MGM are making a strong play to secure Robert Pattinson as the next Bond. That play includes a shorter franchise commitment than offered to rivals Josh O’Connor and Jack Lowden, who “were required to sign up for four Bonds, if chosen,” Belloni wrote. He continued, “Pattinson, on the other hand, was able to lower that commitment to three (plus a whole lot more money than the others), given his stardom.” In other words, we might be seeing a trilogy from director Denis Villeneuve and Pattinson, setting a new standard in the world of 007.

Continuity has never been important to Bond, as demonstrated by the opening of 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, when Roger Moore‘s Bond visits the grave of his wife, Tracy. In most cases, it would make perfect sense for a man to think about his late wife. But Tracy only appeared in the sole George Lazenby outing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service from 1969, and the murder rampage that opens Sean Connery‘s return in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever isn’t explicitly his revenge for her death. In fact, the beginning of For Your Eyes Only is the one time that any Bond film directly references Tracy.

As powerful as Diana Rigg’s performance as Tracy was, audiences accepted Bond’s apparent lack of attention toward his late wife. They understood the franchise as a series of stand-alone adventures, so loosely connected that Charles Gray could play British intelligence agent Dikko Henderson in 1967’s You Only Live Twice and then become the third person to portray arch-villain Blofeld onscreen for Diamonds Are Forever, both of which feature Connery.

But the nature of blockbuster cinema has changed. Audiences only understand stakes in terms of ongoing stories, as demonstrated by the way they talk about superhero franchises. The X-Men movies suddenly matter again because they’re being integrated into Avengers: Doomsday, while The Marvels doesn’t really count because it hardly continued the tale of the MCU. The firing of James Gunn isn’t just throwing the entire DCU into turmoil, but it’s making audiences wonder if they should even catch up with an acclaimed series like Lanterns, because the events of that show may no longer count toward future stories.

When Casino Royale rebooted Bond in 2006, it fully embraced modern blockbusters, starting a story that would be told over the next four movies. In fact, the 2008 follow-up A Quantum of Solace picks up directly after Casino Royale, with Bond taking action for the death of Vesper Lynd in a way that makes his avenging Tracy seem downright glacial.

But the Craig era also felt like a major swing away from the established Bond model, perhaps too far afield. Do we want to see the first adventures of a new 007 each and every time? And didn’t that approach run into trouble when Craig grew tired of the role, to say nothing of strikes and COVID, meaning that it took 16 years to tell the full story? Why run that risk in the future?

Focusing on trilogies allows the franchise to split the difference, giving audiences a bit of an ongoing story without overburdening the character. Moreover, as Belloni indicates, a trilogy would also allow more big-name talent to do their take on Bond. Even though notables such as Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Danny Boyle, and Quentin Tarantino have all expressed interest to varying degrees in making a Bond movie, thus far, the franchise’s only auteur was Sam Mendes, then best known for American Beauty. And while every Bond actor has gone on to make a name for themselves, only Pierce Brosnan was fully established when he got the part, and then on the TV show Remington Steele.

A limited, three-picture deal would better draw the attention of people like Villeneuve and Pattinson, offering them the irresistible opportunity to play in such a fabled playground, but not shackling them for forever. And if longtime Bond fans don’t like what the creative team does with the character, they don’t have to give up the franchise forever. They can just wait until the trilogy is done and see if they like the next tenure better.

And even if the whole trilogy thing doesn’t pan out, well, that’s hardly the end of the world. If there’s one thing the Bond franchise has proven, it’s that it can weather all manner of audience shifts and changes in the culture, keeping the adventure going, in one way or another, for more than 60 years.