‘Spectre’ at 10: How This Box Office Smash Nearly Killed The James Bond Franchise

It should have been an easy victory lap for James Bond – even a grittier, less cheerful version. It was three years after Skyfall, the 2012 film that featured Daniel Craig’s third outing as Agent 007, became the first billion-dollar Bond. And sure, a few of the Sean Connery entries, proto-blockbusters that were Star Wars-sized sensations in their day, might have sold more tickets in the 1960s. But for a series that in modern incarnations had been a strong, respectable box office player that nonetheless tended to do less business than your average Batman movie, Skyfall was huge. Its 2015 follow-up, Spectre, was handed what may have been the easiest layup in the series’ history, or at least in the 20 years since Pierce Brosnan kicked off a new era of Bond with Goldeneye.

And technically, Spectre did what it was supposed to do. Reuniting Craig with Skyfall director Sam Mendes, in relatively short order the movie became the second-biggest Bond movie in the U.S. and worldwide. This was probably about as good as the movie could have hoped for. Skyfall nearly doubled the take for Quantum of Solace and Casino Royale (which grossed near-identical amounts in the U.S. and abroad), and received rapturous reviews, plus four Oscar nominations. To expect more would have been foolhardy; to expect less would have been realistic. And to expect Spectre to collapse somewhere around the halfway mark and possibly wound the Bond franchise for good, well, that was more of a surprise.

Again, Spectre was still a worldwide smash that became only the second Bond to pass $800 million globally. It’s also important to note that No Time to Die, its follow-up and Craig’s swan song in the role, was hobbled principally by a global pandemic that delayed its spring 2020 release to fall of 2021, where it performed respectably and received much better reviews. But the reason No Time to Die was in the position to come out a whopping six years after Spectre in the first place – making Craig the longest-running Bond in time while making significantly fewer actual movies than Sean Connery or Roger Moore – was some hesitation from Craig and various filmmakers following Spectre. The film’s reception assured that Eon Productions would not be able to simply re-up with most of the major creative forces for another installment. That reluctance has rippled outward; it’s now been a full decade since Spectre’s release, a time that has seen the release of one (1) subsequent Bond film. Between 1985 and 1995, the only other similarly fallow period in the series’ six-decade history, the company managed four. (Cycling through three different Bonds in the process, but still.)

So what went awry with the Spectre mission? Not everything, that’s for sure. It’s hardly the worst Bond movie on record; for one thing, it’s got a stacked ensemble, with Craig acting alongside Ben Whishaw (Q), Naomie Harris (Moneypenny), Ralph Fiennes (M), Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci as the Bond girls, and Dave Bautista as a silent henchmen. More specifically, it has some bona fides in place, starting with a terrific 12-minute opening sequence, itself opening with a five-minute tracking shot following Bond through a Day of the Dead festivity in Mexico, ending at an assassination that turns into a collapsing building that turns into a foot chase that turns into an airborne scuffle from within a helicopter. Later, there’s a light-on-its-wheels nighttime car chase with some agreeably silly gags, and around the 90-minute mark there’s a multi-train-car fight between Bautista and Craig (resplendent in a white dinner jacket to match Seydoux’s gorgeous silvery-blue dress) that plays like an update of one of the best scenes in From Russia with Love.

Yes, for the length of a normal feature film, Sam Mendes figures out how to keep Spectre in sync with the moody, shadowy world of the previous Craig Bonds while teasing out some of the more traditionally Bondian elements – henchmen, gadgets, comic relief. Maybe it’s a bit less fleet than the previous three Craig Bonds, but to some degree, that was expected, right?

But with a little less than an hour to go, the oxygen leaks out with the steady efficiency of a supervillain deathtrap. That’s especially odd because the trip to the villain’s lair and accompanying revelation that Bond’s thought-to-be-dead adopted brother is actually this iteration’s version of Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) isn’t nearly as scary or mind-blowing as the movie seems to think. From there, the movie turns to leaden franchise management, climaxing with an unbelievably unexciting scene where Bond races against the nighttime demolition of an old office building. MI6 headquarters, to be precise, but is that exciting? What the hell?

It’s tempting to blame it all on continuity hubris. But Quantum of Solace was also a direct sequel to Casino Royale, and whatever that movie’s faults, it’s one of the fastest-moving Bond pictures ever. And Skyfall, for all of its attempts to play as a standalone adventure, definitely builds upon the two previous Craig installments. There’s probably no way to do the kind of Bond Craig was always aiming for – more grounded, more recognizably human even in his cruelties, less cutesy and retro – without some degree of continuity between the movies. In fact, No Time to Die stubbornly retains this element, even bringing back Seydoux and Waltz’s characters, and generates some pretty decent emotional catharsis from the whole deal.

The real souring element of Spectre, in retrospect, seems like a bigger-picture issue than mere continuity (though related to it). Assembling a James Bond movie has been a transparent act of franchise management for the vast majority of the series’ history; what could be more mercenary than swapping a visibly irritated Sean Connery back into pole position for Diamonds Are Forever when the other fellow before him didn’t work out? But Spectre doesn’t do any of that business with a wink and a smile. Its biggest franchise-y moves, namely attempting to tie Walz’s Blofeld into the whole tapestry of the Craig Bonds, are executed with a lugubrious seriousness that belies the lack of actual drama behind them. After 90 minutes of well-tuned Bond balance, you get a worst-of-both-worlds scenario that’s at once dopily franchise-centric and disastrously self-serious.

As it turns out, 2015 might have been the worst possible time to flub your franchising, as so many contemporary series reshuffled the decks that year, often to billion-dollar results. Star Wars came back with an energized apology in the form of The Force Awakens, the glowing reception to which tricked Disney into listening to the internet whenever they felt unsure about future installments. Jurassic World similarly went for a bigger-better nostalgia play, which paid off huge, while Furious 7 pulled off the unenviable task of arranging a late-series eulogy to one of its stars. Bond’s shadow for the past 20 years, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series, locked into what later revealed itself as franchise-maintenance mode with Rogue Nation, putting Christopher McQuarrie into the director’s chair that he’d occupy for three more installments.

None of these movies were released while Spectre was still in the writing or production phases. But their success does help clarify why the movie’s big final-hour revelations feel like the bottom falling out of a mystery box, and why its spectacle feels to spent. Prior to Skyfall, Bond had been an event without long-gap ceremony. They tended to arrive two, maybe three years apart, a stalwart of the blockbuster economy. Spectre only took three years to show up, but it was still able to produce a sense of we-waited-all-this-time-for-that befuddlement that played against Bond’s good-enough ethos. This wasn’t uniquely Bond’s fault, or an unnatural conflict; it may actually be a moment of prescience for a series that’s generally been in trend-following catch-up mode for much of its existence. Bond somehow emerged from the on-paper rousing success of the Craig era – the five biggest Bonds ever, close to $4 billion in global grosses – in a state of flux as a COVID-wounded, franchise-weakened film industry collapsed like a nondescript MI6 building around it. A lot of Bond’s behind-trend theme songs amount to catchy nonsense, but Spectre’s Sam Smith tune nailed it: the writing really was on the wall.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.