Hollywood is still in a bit of a pickle right now. No sooner had they started to rebound from the early days of the pandemic did the AMPTP allow a two-pronged strike to slam on the breaks once more. Studio execs settled with the WGA a few weeks back, but they’ve yet to do the same with SAG-AFTRA. They’re not the only ones in the industry dragging their feet.

In a new interview with The Guardian (in a bit caught by Deadline), the producers of the long-running Bond franchise gave an update about their latest reboot. Surely there’s some big news given that No Time to Die, the one that ended the Daniel Craig era with a bang, came out two dang years ago. And yet here’s producer Barbara Broccoli, telling the publication that they “haven’t even begun” to work on it.

And yet Broccoli admits they have “a big road ahead” of them when it comes to reinventing a character who’s been repeatedly reinvented over the last six decades. Still, she’s optimistic that they can nip this one in the bud, again.

“I go back to GoldenEye when everyone was saying ‘the cold war is over, the wall is over, Bond is dead, no need for Bond, the whole world’s at peace and now there’s no villains’ – and boy was that wrong!” Broccoli told the paper.

The last time they modernized Bond, with the tougher, more brooding, less gleefully sexist Daniel Craig, they “wanted to focus on what a 21st-century hero would look like”.

Craig, Broccoli said, “gave us the ability to mine the emotional life of the character … and also the world was ready for it. I think these movies reflect the time they are in, and there’s a big, big road ahead reinventing it for the next chapter and we haven’t even begun with that.”

Broccoli also vowed to avoid one modern trend: They won’t be world building across movies and television.

“Our focus is making the feature films. When we get going on a Bond movie it takes our full attention for three or four years so that’s our focus,” she said. “We make the Bond movies for the big theatrical screen and everything about the Bond movies is for audiences to see around the world on that format, so we’ve not wanted to do television.”

In the meantime, if it’s Bond you’re hankering for, there happens to be dozens of movies — and even books — that will get you through till whenever there’s yet another reboot.

(Via The Guardian and Deadline)