The Five Spot: The Hunt Is On For The Next James Bond (Again)

Also: A perplexing Hallmark tagline and an international kayak mystery

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Maybe you will be James Bond

The woman in charge of selecting the next James Bond is named Barbara Broccoli. We have to start there because, well, I am a child. She’s been in charge of the franchise for 30 years, actually. She took over from her father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who produced the franchise from the very beginning and also may or may not have been involved in the death of the creator of The Three Stooges. (True! Look it up!) The Broccoli family has been synonymous with James Bond for so long that sometimes I forget how wild it is that someone whose real name is “Barbara Broccoli” gets to make these decisions, kind of like how Larry Bird was so good at basketball that it makes you forget how funny it is that there’s just a 6’8 dude out there running around in Indiana whose name is “Larry Bird.” What a world, you know?

Anyway, Barbara Broccoli is in the news again this week because she is on the hunt for the next James Bond. She has been for a while, actually, ever since Daniel Craig swapped out his tuxedo for Benoit Blanc’s Southern accent. There was a rumor for a while that Idris Elba was in the running, although that might have been more of a fandom-based dreamcasting than anything else. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s name is getting tossed around a lot right now. Here’s what Barbara had to say about it all this week in a piece at The Independent.

People are always playing the guessing game with the role, whether it was the long-running fan campaign for Idris Elba or any number of promising young actors who pop on the scene. The latest, stickiest rumor is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but Broccoli and Wilson are staying tight-lipped on even a general timeline for when an announcement might come.

“It’s a big decision,” she said.

They’ve teased some things: It will be a man. He’ll likely be in his 30s. Whiteness is not a given. And whoever says yes is doing so with the expectation of at least a decade’s worth of films.

A dude in his 30s with no major career plans for the next 10 years. Huh. Congrats to your loser ex on becoming the next James Bond, I guess.

I don’t know. People can and will speculate about all of this until a decision is made, and then they will yell about it, and then it will, like, fine, probably, as they are with most things. My only contribution to the discourse is to point out that I joked about making Joe Pera the next James Bond a few days ago and it’s been making me giggle a lot ever since.

@joeperaHOW TO BUILD A BEAN ARCH from 'Joe Pera Talks with You' Season 2, Episode 1 (2019) #joepera #joeperatalkswithyou #comedy #adultswim #slowandsteady #beanarch

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I would pay good money to watch a Bond movie that has a scene in the middle where he orders a martini and proceeds to look straight into the camera to talk to the audience about olives for 20 minutes straight. Consider this, Barbara Broccoli.

FOUR: The tagline for the upcoming Hallmark movie “Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story” is driving me insane