The James Bond franchise has been in a strange, icy status for years. Daniel Craig’s Bond died in a fiery explosion at the end of 2021’s “No Time to Die,” and rumors immediately started fluttering about who would be the next Bond. Michael Fassbender? Idris Elba?

The answer, it turns out, was “nobody.” The same year that ‘No Time to Die’ released, Amazon purchased MGM Studios, who were co-owners of the James Bond franchise, and were keen to get started making new “00” TV shows, spin-offs, and even a possible alternative version of Bond, played by a female.

Amazon was excited about all this new potential “content.” However, they seemingly hadn’t read enough about MGM’s ownership deal of Bond, as it was co-owned by Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother, Michael G. Wilson, and they had complete creative control of the Bond franchise. And, as detailed in a lengthy December report in the Wall Street Journal, Broccoli didn’t just hate Amazon’s ideas for the franchise but was positively offended by their reference to it as “content.” According to the report, she thought that Amazon executives were “idiots” and felt they didn’t honestly care about the material; they only cared about algorithms and making more “content.”

The only Bond properties approved since 2021 were 2023’s flop reality TV show “007: Road to a Million” — hosted by Succession’s Brian Cox — and an unnamed and unreleased Bond video game produced by IO Interactive, the team behind the almost perfect game, Hitman: World of Assassination. The former seemed like a concession to Amazon; the latter was a golden opportunity that will take time to pan out.

For the longest time, it felt like Broccoli would not move. Amazon would have to make Bond the way she wanted when she wanted, and if they wouldn’t give her that, then there wouldn’t be any more Bond properties, simple as that. But today, that story changed as Amazon announced that Broccoli and Wilson have stepped back from producing the Bond films and handed creative control entirely to Amazon. They remain co-owners in the property and therefore will financially benefit from Amazon’s decisions, but have been paid an undisclosed but presumably enormous sum to hand over the reins.

It’s easy to be cynical about what Amazon will do with this franchise now that they are completely unshackled. The plans mentioned in the Journal story do seem utterly terrible, and it would be awful to see them strip-mine this property as Disney has done with Marvel and Star Wars; two once enormous, beloved properties that killed their goodwill by putting quantity over quality. The one hope is that Amazon will have seen their mistakes and won’t run it into the ground. After all, nobody is going back to watch “She-Hulk”.

One doesn’t need to be a betting man to predict with almost 100% confidence that Amazon will announce a narrative Bond TV show within a year, along with likely a different Bond who will take on the movie franchise. Amazon has already made a big-budget spy show in their $250M “Citadel” — and its multiple international spin-offs — and I suspect the push to buy control from Broccoli was motivated by the recent success of spy shows like “Day of the Jackal”, “The Agency”, and Amazon’s own “Mr. & Mrs Smith”.

These could be tied into the films, which will doubtlessly continue, but the more likely approach would be to split the cinematic Bond into one style and actor, and the shows into another. My colleague at The Spectator, Ben Domenech, suggested that Amazon could set the TV show in the 1960s, returning to the franchise’s retro, Cold War roots, and then set the Bond films in the modern day. From here, Amazon could still do spin-off shows, focused on other agents, but do so once they’ve established goodwill for the brand, and excited audiences for this new Bond.

I also expect Bond to appear in more video games — with a first-person shooter “Golden Eye” remake being an inevitability — but the success of IO Interactive’s game will ultimately guide what direction that division takes.

For now, it’s back to the speculation about who will play the next Bond. Even Jeff Bezos seems excited.