I have written here before about how I have three major obsessions when it comes to film and the media: The Lord of the Rings and the work of JRR Tolkien; Star Trek; and James Bond. All three are major cultural phenomena in their own right, and I have adored all three since childhood. I still have fond memories of dad reading Tolkien’s books to me and my brothers before we went to sleep. My memories are equally warm of watching Star Trek The Next Generation on BBC2 every Wednesday evening. And who grew up without adoring the James Bond films?

Yet, it seems to me that all three are being torn to shreds in the contemporary mediascape. As I said a few days ago, Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord Of The Rings twenty years ago were cinematic masterpieces, but what followed quickly descended into mass-media pap. The very act of adapting Tolkien’s novels for the screen – giving it ‘the Star Wars treatment‘ – virtually invited charlatans with little respect for the source material to mine it for every penny they could. The Hobbit was just about okay, but did not need to be stretched over three films; but I’m afraid Amazon’s Rings of Power is an unwatchable insult to anyone who loves and respects the work of Tolkien.

Sadly, exactly the same thing has happened to Star Trek: since the end of Enterprise and the advent of the Kelvin timeline, it has been reduced to confused, meaningless pap. I admittedly watched Picard largely for nostalgia’s sake, but series like Strange New Worlds are so cheesy and crammed with fan-service and self-referential bollocks that it hasn’t seemed worth bothering with. These days the Star Trek franchise lacks the captivating intrigue of humanity going out to explore the galaxy which made me fall in love with it in the first place, and has become just another piece of commercial mass entertainment, designed to entice viewers to watch it but essentially meaning and saying nothing.

I now fear this is what is going to happen to James Bond too. Since Amazon acquired the rights to Bond on Thursday, there has of course been a plethora of online speculation about where they will take the franchise. Many are saying that we can expect to see something quite soon. That is obviously good news after the 007 drought of the last few years. However, I now worry that the Bond franchise will now be open to the same commercial forces which Lord of the Rings and Star Trek have succumbed to. Whereas before now we have been used to watching a new Bond film every to or three years, full of action, intrigue, international escapism and wonderful locations, I suspect Bond too will be sucked dry. We’ll see spin-offs and television series, loosely related to the source material but lacking any of the cinematic aura which made Bond so popular in the first place. It too will just become commercial, mass-market, meaningless pap.

This obviously makes me very sad indeed. I may just be getting old, bitter and cynical, but all three of the franchises I have adored since childhood have now been or are going to be reduced to mass market bits of fluff, lacking any of the things which made them so compelling in the first place. I suppose it’s just a result of the contemporary corporate world: the more popular a franchise becomes, the more likely it is to be bought and sucked dry by a massive American company. I find myself wishing that all three could have remained the wonderful, bespoke pieces of fiction I fell in love with, but ultimately in this brave new capitalistic world of soulless exploitation, that is rather naive.