‘Spectre’: How the Multiverse Era Killed James Bond
Until 2008, the James Bond franchise was a lot like Groundhog Day: An infinite loop, every lap of which was superficially different but fundamentally the same. Over the course of 21 self-contained installments, six male leads and 46 years, audiences had grown accustomed to the idea that each subsequent movie would be less like a novelistic chapter than a new drawing on a recently shaken Etch a Sketch. Not until Memento would there be another leading man with such a terrible memory; when Bond’s wife was assassinated in the closing moments of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the iconic spy was literally a different person by the time the next film began.
Bond was able to survive any number of tectonic shifts in the cultural landscape in large part because of the series’ timeless formula: hit up exotic locations, kill some henchman, have sex with numerous women, immediately forget about them when they’re murdered a few scenes later, and defeat an evil mastermind. When Star Wars changed the landscape in 1977, Bond went to space. When James Cameron raised the bar for muscular Hollywood spectacle in the early Nineties, Bond was reinvented as an explosive action star with a newfound gift for collateral damage. When the Bourne films started making 007 seem stodgy by comparison, the series responded by introducing a grittier, more grounded sensibility and Daniel Craig‘s portrayal of Bond as a back-alley bruiser. He was nothing if not a man of his time.
And then he met Tony Stark.
The Big Bang of the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper, 2008’s Iron Man ushered in an age when even the biggest studio blockbuster could function like an episode of a network TV show, as concerned with advertising the next edition as they were with establishing a solid conflict for the one in progress. Creating a perpetual tempest of hype (complete with casting rumors, credit stingers, and the power to elevate geek rhetoric like “Phase 1” into the multiplex vernacular), Marvel used the relationships between their various movies to whip fans into a constant state of frenzy. Others quickly took notice — there’s a reason the Fast and the Furious franchise promptly returned to its original cast for its fourth installment and focused on building a dense “family” mythology out of the twisted metal and white noise, raking in massive box-office returns.
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