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The Associated Press: Bond's
return leads light season for
Hollywood franchise flicks
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Hollywood insiders forecast a weak fall movie season without any blockbuster movies on the
horizon. Casino Royale is seen as a weak replacement for a real money making franchise.
Funny, Bond didn’t have these concerns under Brosnan. Die Another Day went head to head with
the Harry Potter franchise and still brought home the bacon.
August 28th 2006
Associated Press
Bond's return leads light season for Hollywood franchise flicks
By DAVID GERMAIN
AP Movie Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Hollywood may wish it had kept a great ape, a lion, a witch or a wizard in
the bullpen for this fall, whose movie lineup has just two really familiar names: James Bond and
Santa Claus.
The movie industry's prestige period, when studios trot out their big Academy Award
contenders, also has become a steady blockbuster season with such recent hits as "The Lord of
the Rings" trilogy, most of the "Harry Potter" flicks and last year's "King Kong" and "The
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
Lacking any of those entries, the fall schedule is led by "Casino Royale," Daniel Craig's first
outing as British superspy Bond.
Inheriting the license to kill from Pierce Brosnan, Craig is the sixth actor to play 007. Adapted
from Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, "Casino Royale" takes James back to his beginnings as a
young operative taking on a terrorist ring being financed at an exotic gambling hall.
Not yet the casual womanizer of later years, Bond is assigned a gorgeous woman as ally -
Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), a bean-counter dispatched by British intelligence to keep tabs on the
money he's gambling with.
Uncharacteristically, Bond falls in love - and gets his heart stomped on.
"We're kind of meeting him for the first time, and a number of things need to be explained. His
attitude toward women, how he becomes what he becomes," Craig said. "He meets Vesper, this
very beautiful, very complex, very mysterious girl who steals his heart then double-crosses him.
It may explain the distrust of Bond for women later."
Hollywood revives a handful of other film franchises this fall, including Tim Allen's "The Santa
Clause 3: The Escape Clause," in which Jack Frost (Martin Short) makes a play to steal
Christmas from St. Nick.....(article continues)
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