Entertainment
What Amazon MGM’s creative control over the James Bond film franchise means for the future of 007
Daniel Craig portrayed James Bond from 2006 to 2021. As Amazon MGM gains control over the franchise, fans speculate on the future direction, potential “woke” storylines, and whether a unified Bond universe akin to Marvel will emerge, involving diverse media.
Colin Burnett, Washington University in St. Louis
James Bond was front and center at the 2025 Academy Awards – and in a somewhat curious way.
In a musical number, Lisa of Blackpink, Doja Cat and Raye sang the Bond theme songs “Live and Let Die,” “Diamonds Are Forever” and “Skyfall,” respectively. No Bond films had been nominated for an award, and none of these singers has a connection to the Bond franchise, though they did all recently collaborate on the single “Born Again.”
The strange exercise felt less like a celebration and more like a big flashing question mark for a screen icon whose future has never felt more uncertain.
Since the shocking news dropped on Feb. 20, 2025, that Jeff Bezos’ Amazon MGM Studios would assume creative control over the James Bond film franchise, commentators and fans have wondered why.
Why would the Broccoli family, which has long held the rights to Bond movies through their company, EON, cede control of the film series to a tech partner they’ve been at odds with?
Two possibilities have emerged.
First, EON’s Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the stepson and daughter of legendary EON producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, may have reached a point of creative exhaustion. There could be something to this theory. According to Puck’s Matthew Belloni, the 83-year-old Wilson and 64-year-old Broccoli were having difficulty figuring out their next step after 2021’s “No Time to Die.”
A second reason could be Amazon’s impatience with EON. In December 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Barbara Broccoli balked when Amazon Studios executive Jennifer Salke proposed several Bond spinoff projects, including a Bond series with a female lead, for Prime Video. Perhaps frustrated with the stalemate, Amazon may have made Wilson and Broccoli an offer they couldn’t refuse to get them out of the way and get production of Bond content rolling.
The speculation is certainly intriguing. But a more central question shouldn’t be overlooked: the “what.”
What, precisely, has Amazon MGM acquired? And what can it actually do with the Bond story?
Breaking down the Bond rights
In my research on the 007 franchise, I’ve discovered that this property has never been a traditional film series.
Long before “Star Wars” launched in 1976 and the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched in 2008, Bond relied on a range of mediums to tell its story.
The Bond franchise began in 1953, not with a film but with a novel, Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale.” One year later, “Casino Royale” was adapted for American TV as a live anthology show. Four years after that, in 1958, a popular Bond comic strip made its debut.
It was only in 1962, with “Dr. No,” starring Sean Connery, that the now-iconic film series began.
Since then, James Bond has been spun off into a children’s animated show, choose-your-own-adventure books, a “Young Bond” novel series, video games, a reality show, radio dramas and more.
Here’s what’s crucial: With its new deal, Amazon MGM has a controlling stake only in the rights that EON holds. EON has licensed the right to produce future films and TV shows from Fleming since 1961. EON secured worldwide merchandising rights in 1964 and production rights to video games in the early 1990s.
Other 007 media – the literary, comic and audio series – are managed by the Fleming Estate and Ian Fleming Publications.
The James Bond media franchise is what I call a shared rights and licensing network.
No one company controls all of the Bond rights, and no one company produces all of Bond media. Though this arrangement is a complicated one, the sharing and licensing of rights has allowed Bond to emerge as a lucrative and fecund product line. According to my calculations, it now boasts over 330 original stories in 72 years of media production.
In other words, Bond is much more than the 25 films released by EON.
James Bond’s many lives
Until now, rights sharing and licensing have ensured that the Bond franchise remains creatively distinct from “Star Wars” and Marvel.
The companies that produce these series – LucasFilm and Marvel Studios – are owned by The Walt Disney Company. With their rights pooled under one corporate entity that also oversees all production, “Star Wars” and Marvel have been able to drive toward high levels of creative consistency and unity among their stories. Across films, TV, comics and video games, “Star Wars” and Marvel aspire to what media specialists call “transmedia storytelling.”
By sharing rights, the Bond franchise has arrived at a very different type of storytelling, one that fragments the story and multiplies the James Bonds to be experienced across distinct media. The effect isn’t transmedia storytelling, or even a Marvel-style multiverse. In Bond, characters can’t cross over to alternate realities and meet other versions of themselves.
James Bond exists in many different worlds and leads many different lives.
To name a few: There’s the Bond of Fleming’s 1950s and 1960s novels, who loses his first love, Vesper Lynd, and hunts down her killers, who are members of SMERSH, the assassination arm of Soviet intelligence agencies. Fleming’s Bond also lives on in the novels of Kingsley Amis and John Gardner, which were published in the 1970s and 1980s.
There’s EON’s silver screen Bond, who, from 1962 to 2002, never falls in love with Vesper, but loses his wife, Tracy di Vicenzo, to the crime syndicate SPECTRE and remains scarred by the loss. And in the modern era, there’s the Bond who appears in author Samantha Weinberg’s “Moneypenny Diaries.” Published from 2005 to 2008, the series depicts a version of Bond who has retired to a small Scottish isle with his lover, MI6’s Miss Moneypenny.
The effect of Bond’s shared structure is what I dub “threaded storytelling.” The novels present various versions of Bond’s life, at different points in history. The film series creates two of its own. The comic series offers yet more lives of 007.
Each version of Bond runs alongside the others in the market, focusing on a Bond character who exists only within his unique story world. This gives fans an unpredictable, ever-expanding canon of stories to follow and even compare, like one grand spot-the-difference game in time.
Where next for Bond?
The deal between Amazon MGM and EON awaits regulatory approval in the U.S. and U.K.
If it goes through, Amazon MGM will have a strong property on its hands. Over the decades, EON has reinforced certain elements to the character and the story: James Bond is a debonair hitman. MI6 chief M gives him high-stakes missions. MI6 armorer Q fits him with the latest gadgets. And Bond lives large, enjoying beautiful women, fine dining, Savile Row fashions and Omega timepieces.
Amazon MGM is unlikely to tinker with these Bondian elements. They’re also likely to preserve the movies’ “Bond formula” – the gun barrel visual that kicks off each film, elaborately designed credit sequences, film-specific theme songs, and the closing title card that reads, “James Bond Will Return.”
Yet some fans fear that Amazon MGM will develop “woke” storylines. Others foresee the product being diluted with countless streaming spinoff series.
To me, the more intriguing possibility is whether Amazon will try to create a more unified Bond universe, akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, the Fleming Estate will continue to manage the novels, comics and radio. But with creative control over EON’s rights, Amazon MGM could, in theory, develop an elaborate transmedia strategy never before explored in this franchise.
A relaunched film series, perhaps serving as Amazon MGM’s “mothership,” would feed into satellite series in video games and streaming shows. These games and shows, in turn, would tie into and expand the universe of the films.
Were that to happen, the Bond franchise would truly enter a new phase and risk losing much of the creative flexibility it’s possessed in the past.
Colin Burnett, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Entertainment
30 years after ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ Jay‑Z’s career embodies hip‑hop’s biggest contradictions
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“Reasonable Doubt” was not the first rap album I ever owned. But Jay-Z’s debut was the first hip-hop album I bought with my own money.
30 years after ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ Jay‑Z’s career embodies hip‑hop’s biggest contradictions
Jabari M. Evans, University of South Carolina
“Reasonable Doubt” was not the first rap album I ever owned. But Jay-Z’s debut was the first hip-hop album I bought with my own money. More importantly, it was the first one I studied as a young writer who aspired to become a rapper, a dream that eventually came true.
Jay-Z sounded cool in a way that resembled a jazz musician more than a conventional rap star. He rapped with a quiet calm that also conveyed supreme confidence. His lyrics were layered, skillful and unorthodox.
Yes, the tracks often revolved around drug dealing. But the hustlers who populated “Reasonable Doubt” weren’t degenerates. They were refined and astute thinkers. And unlike other gangsta rappers, there was a moral quandary at the heart of his storytelling. In tracks like “D’Evils,” Jay-Z’s narrator turns crime, aspiration and paranoia into meditations on capitalism and the psychic cost of wealth:
We used to fight for building blocks
Now we fight for blocks with buildings that make a killing
The closest of friends when we first started
But grew apart as the money grew, and soon grew black-hearted
And later:
My soul is possessed by D’Evils in the form of diamonds and Lexuses
The cinematic complexity displayed in its tracks helps explain why “Reasonable Doubt” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and why it still matters 30 years later.
But the album also launched the career of a rapper whose own trajectory has come to mirror hip-hop’s own transformation.
In 1996, hip-hop was still fighting for legitimacy. Three decades later, it had been folded into the mainstream. Kendrick Lamar can win a Pulitzer Prize, Nas can have an endowed fellowship at Harvard University, and Jay-Z, who once couldn’t get signed to a label, can create a label of his own and become a billionaire business mogul.
Is it even possible for hip-hop to be seen as countercultural in 2026? And what happens when hip-hop’s most successful outsider becomes central to the very institutions he once seemed to challenge?
From moral panic to corporate behemoth
When “Reasonable Doubt” was released, hip-hop was both ascendant and under siege.
In February 1996, Tupac Shakur came out with “All Eyez on Me,” which became one of the bestselling rap albums of all time; seven months later, he was shot and killed. His friend-turned-rival, The Notorious B.I.G., was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting the following year. The media often cast these high-profile deaths as proof that rap music was inseparable from street violence, and the moral panic around hip-hop’s influence on young listeners only intensified.
How times have changed. Today, hip-hop powers advertising campaigns, luxury branding and streaming platforms. According to Nielsen, rap surpassed rock music as the most popular music genre in the U.S. in 2018. Today, it accounts for roughly 1-in-4 on-demand audio streams.
Jay-Z has played an outsized role in that transformation.
Since 1998, he’s won 25 Grammys for his own music. In that time, he’s also built a business empire. There’s his talent agency, Roc Nation; his streaming platform, TIDAL; his venture capital firm, Marcy Venture Partners; and his luxury alcohol brands, Armand de Brignac and D’Ussé. Through Roc Nation, he’s also a strategic partner with the NFL, advising the football league on its entertainment programming.
Forbes currently pegs his net worth at US$2.8 billion.
Confronted on capitalism
In April 2026, GQ published a long interview with Jay-Z.
This was a big deal: Jay-Z hadn’t interacted with the media like this since 2017, when he was promoting his 13th solo album, “4:44.”
How would one of hip-hop’s elder statesmen reflect on his career and his many successes?
In the interview, Jay-Z didn’t present his riches as a complicated outcome of capitalism’s contradictions. Instead, he talked about his wealth as if it were something his critics had failed to understand. When asked about the belief that there’s something inherently suspect about accumulating so much money, he pushed back:
“It’s almost like a cop-out. You get to demonize this group of folks without fixing the actual system that exists […] Your morality defines who you are. Your morality is not defined by a dollar amount.”
As for the notion that his career trajectory was somehow hypocritical:
“The only thing I heard coming up was the American dream. You could make it, if you pull yourself up by the bootstraps. I heard that my entire life – until we started being successful. Then it was like: You’re selling out because you’re making money.”
He then went on to insist that being handsomely paid is not some sort of betrayal to hip-hop, art or his community.
“I make art first and then I make sure that I’m compensated for my art. … That [capitalist] structure exists; I just see the world for what it is, not for what I want it to be. I’m a realist.”
To me, Jay-Z certainly sounded persuasive. He also sounded defensive. I think that’s because hip-hop has long been haunted by the idea that wealth compromises credibility, even as the tracks have always contained aspirational themes of luxury and entrepreneurship.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
For my generation, Jay-Z sold aspiration in addition to albums.
I wore Rocawear denim suits in high school with a kind of conviction that now feels almost funny to admit. In college, drinking Belvedere vodka, which appeared in many a Jay-Z track in the early 2000s, felt like a rite of passage.
That’s because Jay made luxury seem urbane, sophisticated and distinctly Black. Even later in life, when I’d smoke Cohiba cigars, drink D’USSÉ or read about art collecting, I felt like I was living inside a script he had helped write.
Looking back, I can see that much of my admiration for him was cloaked in materialism. Now, I think about the work of political scientist Cedric Robinson, who wrote extensively about what he called “racial capitalism.”
He argued that capitalism has always been structured through race. It does not merely tolerate racial hierarchy; it depends on it. That means Black wealth – even spectacular Black wealth – does not automatically equal Black liberation. One Black billionaire can be held up as evidence of progress, while the broader system that continues to produce Black inequality remains intact.
In other words, if Jay-Z’s ascent becomes shorthand for Black progress, then the critique of the system that continues to oppress those at the margins starts to fade. The culture begins to confuse exceptional mobility with collective freedom.
At the same time, I don’t think Jay-Z can be simply understood as a sellout. Communication scholar A.J. Escoffery has written a lot about what he calls “reparative media.” Essentially, he calls for media institutions to do more than offer tokens of representation to marginalized communities. Media companies need to be built or owned by those communities.
Jay-Z’s defenders will sometimes describe him along these lines – as a Robin Hood-like figure who has taken capital from historically white-owned institutions and redirected some of it toward Black communities or Black entrepreneurs. Even if those gestures remain, at heart, capitalist – like his investments in cannabis brands – he’ll often use his positioning and clout to fund minority-owned businesses.
In the GQ interview, the rapper seemed to acknowledge the compromises he felt compelled to make, and he spoke of the limits Black artists face in industries they do not own:
“[There’s] nowhere you’re going to go that Black people control distribution and control media. At some point you’re going to have to partner with somebody.”
In that, Jay-Z highlights what hip-hop continues to grapple with. The genre no longer has to prove it belongs in the mainstream. But it has to figure out what it means to survive without being fully absorbed by it.
Jabari M. Evans, Assistant Professor of Race and Media, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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amusement and theme parks
Mattel Adventure Park and VAI Resort Continue to Grow, But Opening Date Remains Uncertain
Get the latest update on Mattel Adventure Park and VAI Resort in Glendale, Arizona. Construction continues in 2026, but officials have yet to announce an opening date.
GLENDALE, Ariz. — One of Arizona’s most anticipated entertainment developments continues to make visible progress, but visitors eager to experience Mattel Adventure Park and VAI Resort will likely have to wait longer.
Located near State Farm Stadium in Glendale, the massive VAI Resort project and the adjacent Mattel Adventure Park have been under construction for several years. While the development has transformed the skyline west of Phoenix, recent updates indicate that neither attraction currently has a confirmed opening date.
New Reports Suggest Further Delays
Recent reports published in spring 2026 indicate that VAI Resort officials continue to maintain their policy of announcing an opening date approximately nine months before welcoming guests. Because no such announcement has been made, industry observers and local media outlets now believe a 2026 opening is becoming increasingly unlikely.
The uncertainty extends to Mattel Adventure Park, which was originally expected to open in 2022 before being delayed multiple times. After missing its latest target of late 2025, references to a specific opening date were removed from public materials. Park representatives have stated that they currently have no update regarding an opening timeline.
Construction Continues Across the Property
Despite the delays, construction remains active throughout the resort and theme park complex. Visitors traveling along Loop 101 can easily spot the towering Hot Wheels-themed roller coasters that have become some of the most recognizable structures on the site.
Drone footage and construction updates posted throughout 2026 show ongoing work on hotel towers, entertainment venues, infrastructure, and various attractions within Mattel Adventure Park.
The official VAI Resort website continues to promote its future offerings, including luxury accommodations, restaurants, entertainment venues, retail spaces, and the world’s first Mattel Adventure Park.
What Guests Can Expect
When completed, Mattel Adventure Park is expected to feature attractions inspired by some of Mattel’s most recognizable brands, including:
- Barbie™ Beach House
- Hot Wheels™ Bone Shaker™: The Ultimate Ride
- Hot Wheels™ Twin Mill™ Racer
- Thomas & Friends™ attractions
- Masters of the Universe-themed experiences
- Mattel Games-themed attractions and activities
The park will be Arizona’s first fully themed indoor-outdoor amusement park and is designed to offer experiences for guests of all ages.
Meanwhile, VAI Resort is planned to include four hotel towers with approximately 1,100 rooms, a large entertainment district, multiple restaurants, retail shopping, convention facilities, and a state-of-the-art amphitheater designed to host major concerts and events.
A Growing Vision
One factor contributing to the project’s lengthy timeline appears to be the continued expansion of the resort’s scope. Developers have repeatedly described VAI as a destination that has evolved far beyond its original vision, adding new hospitality, dining, entertainment, and retail components over time. Earlier project statements noted that these expansions affected scheduling for the adjacent theme park.
The development remains one of the largest tourism and hospitality projects currently underway in Arizona, with investments estimated at more than $1 billion.
Looking Ahead
For now, both VAI Resort and Mattel Adventure Park remain works in progress. Construction activity continues, new attractions are still being promoted on official websites, and developers have shown no indication that the project has been abandoned. However, without an announced opening date, Arizona residents and visitors will need to remain patient as Glendale’s ambitious entertainment destination moves closer to completion.
While many expected to be riding Hot Wheels coasters by now, the latest updates suggest that the world’s first Mattel Adventure Park is still a destination for the future rather than the present.
Related External Links
- Mattel Adventure Park Official Website
- VAI Resort Official Website
- City of Glendale Economic Development News
- State Farm Stadium Official Website
- Visit Glendale Arizona Tourism Guide
- Epic Resort Destinations
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Celebrate America’s 250th Birthday with Summer Deals, Savings and Prizes
(Feature Impact) America’s 250th birthday calls for celebration, and this summer, it goes well beyond backyard barbecues and poolside parties.
Watch this video to learn more
To help mark the milestone, Circle K is rolling out refreshing deals, new merch and exciting prizes as America’s Party Stop – the one-stop destination for summer value and fun. The free Inner Circle rewards program is your ticket to the party – join by downloading the Circle K app and creating an account.
Rewards members can enjoy any size Polar Pop for just 25 cents on July 1 at participating locations. Fans can also grab limited-edition merchandise like hats and shirts to show off their love for the iconic drink. From July 1-Sept. 1, anyone can play the new Scratch & Win game daily in the app for instant prizes with members unlocking exclusive eligibility for weekly cash prizes.
The fun extends beyond the store, too. Throughout July, you can support the American Red Cross by rounding up in-store purchases to help disaster relief efforts and first responders across the U.S.
Download the app, join the free rewards program and find more ways to celebrate America’s birthday by visiting CircleK.com/America-250.
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