I was reading this the other day on The New York Times website and I couldn't believe it...not another issue to throw in amongst the monthly updated names thrown into the hat by the papers on who will play the next James Bond after Daniel Craig commented about how he'd rather slit his own wrists if you asked him if he would play the character again he did do a stage production of "Othello" that was produced by Barbara Broccoli and according to "sources" this got rave reviews by critics and these same "sources" say that talks with Daniel Craig about possibly returning to play the character James Bond are now going in the right direction.
So sorry to Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba, Tom Hardy, Damien Lewis, James Norton, Aiden Turner and the other actors names who will undoubtedly find their way into this hat but there seems to be an even bigger problem with the James Bond franchise that needs to be sorted out even before you start asking who will be the next Bond...which film studio will be marketing and distributing the future 007 film?
According to this article on The New York Time' website Sony Pictures which has had a contract to market and distribute the films thus far this contract will expire in 2015,- I do realise that the year is 2017 and that I'm really late to this party but this issue still doesn't seem to have been resolved,-.
And according to articles on The New York Time's website and on Forbe's website the film studios that are vying for these rights are: Sony, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios and a relatively new to the fray Annapurna which according to this same article on The New York Time's website is an ambitious upstart financed and led by Oracle heiress Megan Ellison. Unfortunately this looks like the deal that's being offered up at the moment is to only have the rights to distribute one film but its also thought by this article on Forbe's website that this deal will probably be similar to the deal that Sony had which according to the article on The New York Time's website was Sony paid 50% of the production cost on "Spectre",-this was around $250million after accounting for government incentives-, and they Sony only received 25% certain profits once costs were recoup.
Sony also had to shoulder tens of millions of dollars in marketing and had to give MGM a piece of the profits from non-Bond films in Sony's pipeline including that of "22 Jump Street".
Harsh!
So according to this same article on The New York Time's website the only reason that these studios would want these rights is for bragging rights.
But this same New York Time's article it is said that as MGM is owned by private equity firms including Anchorage Capital Partners wants to keep its options open as it considers a sale or an open offering, and also interestingly in this same article it states that Annapurna has signed as of last month an unrelated distribution deal with MGM...so this could reading between the lines could suggest that Annapurna are a lot closer than these other studios to getting these distribution rights but they'd still have to impress both Barbara Broccoli and her older half brother Michael G. Wilson who actually have the rights and have always been involved with the making of these James Bond movies right from the start.
There's no word yet on who's won this competition for the distribution rights so we'll just have to wait and see but Bond fans shouldn't feel too anxious about this as Forbes thinks that this next film won't be released until 2019.
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