Two huge pieces of 007 news were revealed in the middle of the night. First, MGM has found a new director for their 25th official James Bond movie. Second, they have also found a new release date for Daniel Craig’s fifth (and presumably final) 007 flick.
Cary Fukunaga has been tapped to replace the departed Danny Boyle in the director’s chair. It’s an outside-the-box choice specifically because he isn’t British. This choice once again shows the general pointlessness of offering arbitrary speculation on who will play a given role or who will direct a given movie as if it were hard news. Fukunaga becomes the first American director to helm the fifty year old franchise.
Fukunaga is another pick that falls into the “prestige director” list, as he directed the acclaimed first season of HBO’s True Detective and the acclaimed Netflix original Beasts of No Nation. Next up is a Netflix series with Emma Stone and Jonah Hill entitled Maniac, which premieres tomorrow. He was hired to direct the revamped Stephen King movie It a few years back before parting ways with Warner Bros., who took issue with his desire for more overtly adult content. Andrés Muschietti’s “kids first R-rated horror movie” variation earned $700 million worldwide.
Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli and the studio met numerous directors after Danny Boyle dropped out over creative differences, this after they sparked to the filmmaker’s concept and hired his Trainspotting screenwriter John Hodge to write it. Sources said that it was a big creative swing, and they mutually decided it would be better to go back to the project they planned to make with venerable 007 writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.
