Perhaps I’m being naive but I still see film as an art form. Like literature, it is the creative expression of someone’s worldview through a fictional narrative. Of course there is a lot more to it than that, but by and large that is film in a nutshell: people create films to express themselves and tell others what they think. The thing is, it’s becoming more and more obvious that that is no longer the case. These days, film is becoming more and  more corporate and capitalist. It is less about telling stories and conveying ideas than getting people to pay money to big companies.

I was thinking about James Bond again earlier. Rumours are growing that the next 007 actor will be announced soon. Amazon now own the rights to the Bond films, and have apparently announced a total reboot of the series. What that means is surely as obvious as it is cringeworthy: You don’t have to be Andre Bazin to be able to tell that their talk of a younger Bond simply means that they intend to reframe him entirely, taking Fleming’s character in name only and bending him to suit a commercial, superficial, juvenile audience.

James Bond is a cold, heartless government assassin. Even when Daniel Craig rebooted the role in Casino Royale in 2007, he was already said to have been in the SAS. This is no child, but a womanising, hard drinking bastard. I worry that the executives at Amazon will now hijack cinema’s greatest series and turn Bond into something he never was: an immature, superficial action hero, ideal for commercial dross and computer games but devoid of anything which made him so intriguing over the last sixty years. They want Bond to be little more than a filmic figure young boys see themselves in and feel compelled to go out and buy merchandise, rather than a fictional figure worth analysing on any deeper artistic level.

Amazon will want to make as much money from Bond as possible. To do so they will want the films to appeal as widely as possible, causing them to become generic and commercial. The films they will now create will no doubt appeal to an audience for whom Bond  is nothing but a man in an expensive suit and films are just sequences of exciting stunts; yet shun those of us who prefer to see Bond in a far wider, more intriguing context. The character they will soon show us will no doubt be young, energetic and cocky, and probably quite capable of shooting guns and causing explosions. He will no doubt transform quite easily into a computer game avatar or even plastic toy, but he will not be James Bond.