Since Daniel Craig stepped down from the role, there has been much speculation (and more than a little fear) that the next James Bond would be “woke,” recast as a Black man or a woman. After Amazon dropped a cool $1 billion for full creative control over the franchise, most assumed they wouldn’t rock the boat by changing things too much.
Now, Amazon has made 007 woke in the most unexpected way: by Photoshopping his classic movie covers on Prime Video to remove the guns.
Ruining An Iconic Movie Poster
If you don’t already know, Bond almost always has a gun in his hand in his classic movie posters and subsequent home media covers. This tradition goes back to Dr. No, which had Sean Connery in a polo, arms folded, and a gun nestled comfortably in his hand. Look the movie up on Prime, though, and you’ll notice the gun has been digitally removed and the trigger finger altered to look like he is simply folding his arms in a casual manner.
If Amazon had only changed the Dr. No cover, this would have been bad enough. The iconic film poster perfectly summed up Connery’s secret agent: he is smooth, sexy, and secretly dangerous, all at once. This Photoshopped cover makes him seem less like an action hero and more like a bored member of your local golf club striking a pose in the nearest mirror (For England? No, for the Gram, James).
It Just Keeps Getting Worse
Amazon just kept going and badly Photoshopped more old James Bond covers, each a bit uglier (and somehow even stupider) than the last. While the newer Bond film Spectre simply had the gun cropped out, many images were severely changed.
In Octopussy, Roger Moore’s gun was removed, and his other hand has a weird kung-fu grip, making it look like he’s about to judo chop an invisible foe.
And in Moonraker, Moore is wearing a gold suit (the original was silver) and is now missing his laser gun, which was previously our biggest hint that this movie sends 007 to space.
Amazon also did beloved Bond Pierce Brosnan excessively dirty: the gun has been removed from the Goldeneye cover, making the debonair secret agent look like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Tomorrow Never Dies is even worse, with Brosnan’s expression changed to a weird smirk, a bit like he’s got one of the catchier songs from Mamma Mia! stuck in his head.
But that’s still better than Moore in A View To a Kill and Connery in Thunderball, both of whose images have been changed so much from the originals that the covers now look like, as Bond might describe it, “slop, AI slop.”
Amazon Has No Idea What They’re Doing
As a lifelong Bond fan, I simply have no idea what Amazon is doing here. This franchise’s main character always posed with a gun on the posters precisely because this is his main weapon, and anyone familiar with these movies knows you can expect Bond to shoot a small army of henchmen in each film. Why, then, does Amazon want to pretend that guns aren’t part and parcel of the whole 007 package?
The standard assumption among fans is that Amazon is trying to make Bond “woke” by removing his gun from all these covers. But this won’t fool anyone familiar with the films, and it’s likely to just annoy off anyone watching this franchise for the first time.
Wouldn’t anyone who hates guns enough to approve this decision just get annoyed when they accidentally click on one of these gun-heavy films, presumably because they were expecting a romantic comedy instead of an action-packed spy thriller?
Frankly, all of this bodes very ill for whatever future James Bond movies or (God help us) spinoff TV series Amazon creates. Everyone’s fears that they might make Bond woke seem valid in light of Prime Video Photoshopping one classic cover after another to whitewash these movies of even the appearance of violence. The character no longer has to “die another day:” in the eyes of fans annoyed at this clumsy attempt at censorship, James Bond is already dead.
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