Bondage Crisis?

I think I preferred the 'silly season' when it was all stories about UFOs, poltergeists and the Loch Ness monster.  Nowadays, most tabloids seem to print that sort of stuff all year round and the 'quality' press would never touch it with a barge pole.  Which means that, right now, the press are desperate to fill their pages with just about any old tat dressed up as a 'real' new story.  Hence, in today's Guardian we get served a ridiculous and poorly researched piece on how the Bond franchise is in 'crisis' because Danny Boyle has stepped down as director with only months to go before shooting is set to commence on the next film.  Apparently, this could delay production and release dates and even result in Daniel Craig leaving the series.  All utter nonsense with no evidence to back up these claims.  For one thing, it overestimates the importance of a director to the success of commercial films, particularly big budget behemoths like Bond movies.  Many films have suffered enforced directorial changes whilst actually in production, yet have not suffered at the box office, (The Wizard of Oz springs to mind - accredited to Victor Fleming, two or three other directors also worked on it, most notably King Vidor who shot the black and white sequences topping and tailing the film).  Previous Bond movies have also gone into production with incomplete scripts (Tomorrow Never Dies and Quantum of Solace, for example) yet have still performed at he box office.

But, of course, this is different somehow.  Apparently the Danny Boyle script was just too topical for a Bond movie, the writer of the article claims, leading to 'artistic differences' with Eon Productions.  Which seems unlikely, as, since the latter few Roger Moore films, the Bond movies have increasingly drawn upon current events to inspire their scripts, in order to keep them feeling relevant to contemporary audiences.  This is another case, I suspect, of my pet hate - people who write about films they haven't actually seen.  Besides, if Eon really didn't like the script Boyle wanted to direct from, they've supposedly already got another complete script, written before Boyle came on board, to fall back on.  But, as if this concoction of supposition, half truths and basic ignorance wsn't enough, later on in the same edition of The Guardian we had another opinion piece on Bond, this time telling us (again) that the franchise was played out and simply couldn't be modernised.  Which, again, shows a willful ignorance of the series as a whole.  The producers have proven surprisingly adept at subtly adapting the character, subject matter and style of the movies in order to ensure that they chime with contemporary audiences, successfully seeing off would be rivals into the bargain.  Again, try watching the bloody films before you try commenting on them.