Gun for hire: what does Denis Villeneuve joining as director tell us about the new James Bond?

The Guardian

26-06-2025

At last. Something. Something has emerged from the vast opaque corporate entity that is Amazon Prime, which swallowed up the James Bond brand from Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli – the latter being reportedly discontented (though presumably very much richer).
White smoke has emerged from the funnel marked 'director' – though still nothing from the funnel marked 'star' – and it's a really big hitter. Denis Villeneuve is the Canadian film-maker who gave us the excellent science-fiction movies Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune Parts One and Two, and has demonstrated a real flair for big-budget action thrillers in Sicario and Prisoners, with plenty of the ambient sexiness in hardware and spectacle. (Perhaps Villeneuve will now get the ultimate corporate blessing of being a last-minute wedding guest at the Bezos wedding in Venice this weekend, precisely the sort of event that tends to feature as a Bond film opening scene, to be disrupted by helicopter attack, explosion, kidnapping etc. Mr Bezos himself needs a white persian cat on his lap to stroke.)
Villeneuve is much more than a safe pair of hands or a technical director who can be relied upon to do what the suits tell him; he is an alpha-grade auteur in the same league as Christopher Nolan and so his presence will reassure the fanbase with mixed feelings about the Amazon sale. The message is that, yes, Amazon is still thinking big and that the future Bond will be primarily up there on the big screen where Villeneuve has made his reputation and not simply on the smaller screens where long-form streaming content is reportedly going to be spun off: The Adventures of Moneypenny, The Prequel Adventures of M etc etc. (Although these are surely in development.)
But even given that Villeneuve is in place and he can work perfectly happily with James Norton or Regé-Jean Page or Henry Golding or Tom Hiddleston … what about the writing? When Danny Boyle was temporarily and unhappily brought on as director in 2018, the problem was that he had his own very specific creative vision as regards story, wishing to work in tandem with his own longtime collaborator, the screenwriter John Hodge. But their ideas wouldn't fly with Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli who had their own trusted writers, Bond script veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade who had a track record of getting the goose to lay the golden egg as regular as clockwork.
Who will Villeneuve want to work with? He co-wrote with Jon Spaihts on Dune, with Hampton Fancher and Michael Green on Blade Runner 2049, with Eric Heisserer on Arrival and with Taylor Sheridan on Sicario – on the face of it, he has no sustained partnership in the way Boyle had with Hodge and so he is perhaps not yet married to any high-concept visionary plans, which are going to go over badly when he presents them to Amazon. My guess is that, among these existing writers, he might more instinctively want to work with Sheridan who has certainly shown he can deliver action, thriller-drama and unresolved sexual tension on the 'secular' level outside science fiction.
But basically, yes, Denis Villeneuve is very good news for Bond: a smart, capable director who is going to produce the bangs for Amazon's buck and a witty, involving story for the fans.