Daniel Craigs’ Bond comments highlight an issue in Hollywood

I saw Daniel Craig’s recent comment on Bond and I really wanted to give my 2 cents on the issue, as Craig recently spoke on Bond and on how he feels “Bond should not be played by a woman, but strong parts should be created for women or ethnic minorities” to paraphrase. And while the headline “Bond shouldn’t be a woman” was used by a few websites for clickbait, followed with Craig presumably getting cancelled for his comments I saw quite a lot of people online agree with him, as do I.

There has long been disappointment and criticism of major roles in Hollywood often being solely the territory of the straight white male – looking at Jason Bourne, Bond and just generally your generic action blockbuster is usually always lead by this type-cast.

Though I will say that this has been breaking down in recent years, pushed by movies on or focused around ethnic minorities, heavily by Netflix, Disney/Marvel and other major studios. Craigs’ comments however aren’t wrong and in fact link to a deeper issue with Hollywood in casting and producing new movies, when characters are race or gender swapped to suit or appeal to another audience, something that’s happened in comic book movies a few times now, which at best is lazy casting and at worst, pandering.

The problem alludes to Hollywood’s laziness in commissioning and going out on a limb with new IPs, preferring to just make a female Jason Bourne or female John Wick – and don’t get me wrong, these franchises have been hugely successful, so cloning and slightly tweaking them for another audience should logically work but here’s the thing… it doesn’t. The key point here being that female led movies can do fine on their own with a good enough story, direction and writing (Atomic Blonde, Gunpowder Milkshake, Wonder Woman, Black Widow) – but female led clone movies of existing IPs do not, just look at 2016s’ Ghostbusters or Oceans 8 for example.

The ironic thing about movies that just try to go this route is that they fail because of their attempt to stand out from the original, I’ll dub them the ‘girlboss movie’, in which all males are sexist, bumbling idiots and the female leads are perfect heroes, practically breaking the fourth wall and winking at the female audience through the screen. The irony being the male characters being made caricatures in these action movies, while traditionally in years gone by, female characters occupied the role of the secretary or damsel in distress. And on the face of it, such stories may seem ’empowering’, they’re really just pandering and lazy attempts to reach out to other audiences. And they fail because they’re not good movies, not because men aren’t going to see them, no one is. And further to the point, to dispel a myth, female led movies can perform just as well as if not outperform male-led movies in actuality.

Bridesmaids – Universal Pictures

Ultimately the thing that ethnic minorities, women and other under-represented group probably need as mentioned above, great, original stories that aren’t just cut and pastes from existing franchises, the industry does seem to be making steps towards this, with big screen adaptations like Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi, focusing on ethnic minorities for instance. Also in the last 10 years we have seen a decent amount of prominent female led movie outings, though notably none have really spawned franchises. But the next big step is for big studios to continue to trust original ideas for the above groups, not roles that talk down to an audience to pander to another but roles that break down barriers and break ground so that other groups can see themselves on the big screen in major roles and not pigeon holed or type-cast in stereotypical ones. I’m sure there are a lot of great ideas out there, studios might just need to step out of their comfort zone and see what works.