With Skyfall‘s box office receipts now passing $1.1 billion, it is understandable that the producers of the James Bond franchise would like to replicate whatever magic the film had when assembling the production team for the inevitable next installment.
The most vital member of that team is undoubtedly director Sam Mendes, and according to the London Daily Mail‘s Baz Bamigboye‘s sources, that Mendes while the director “hasn’t firmly made up his mind about directing another Bond, I’m reliably told he’s ‘75 per cent’ of the way towards doing it.”
Purportedly, Mendes’s original reluctance to return to the franchise stemmed from the possibility that the producers were exploring the idea of making the next two Bond films one giant-sized connected adventure that would film back-to-back. Bamigboye states that such a plan would have amounted to a four-year commitment that Mendes was unwilling to make. But with that plan abandoned and Skyfall scripter John Logan having drafted “two treatment papers outlining a rough idea of the plot,” it seems as if Mendes is amenable to the smaller time investment.
It’s not as if Mendes is lacking for work. He currently has two upcoming stage productions hitting the London boards – Charlie And The Chocolate Factory opens in May and then King Lear at the National Theatre next January. of course, this would push a start date for a Bond film under his direction towards late 2014 and I don’t know if the franchise producers want to wait that long to get a follow up into theaters.
I will admit that I am sad to see that the idea to tell a two-film Bond adventure has been abandoned. Besides the cost-savingtaht I am sure the producers would welcome there is the opportunity to tell a really sprawling, epic Bond story. Hopefully, it is an idea that will get revisited in the future as it holds some great potential and the with the recent Casino Royale and Skyfall, it shows that the franchise is still open to try new things.
