5 things to know about new Bond flick ‘Spectre’

WHAT always haunts new James Bond movies is the memories of their predecessors.

James Bond had a license to kill at the box office and executed with a $73 million tally, according to studio estimates. Disappointedly, SPECTRE takes a backwards step falling into a few of the normal Bond problems.

If that’s true, he should seriously reconsider. It was the highest-grossing Bond film of all time. With a production budget of $250 million and millions more in marketing costs, “Spectre” has to pull in $650 million globally to break even.

And films like “Cowboys and Aliens”, “Dream House” and “The Invasion” struck out with audiences and critics, losing millions of dollars in the process.

Craig went on to give advice to future Bond actors. Christoph Waltz is a great actor and can play a role like a violin when given the right tune, but here he was underutilized.

Not the popcorn and nacho concessions, mind you, but rather the heaps of half-century-old nostalgia that moved into theaters.

“I think it’s a combination of connecting with moviegoers who grew up with and were familiar with the Peanuts property coupled with getting kids excited about and introduced to Charlie Brown and Snoopy in a big screen way”, said Chris Aronson, Fox’s president of domestic distribution. The song’s good, for sure, the music video is just cheesy in my opinion, and I don’t quite understand the reasoning behind opening the movie with that. And, yes, he’s probably done as much as he can do plumbing the emotional depths of cinema’s most famous misogynistic alcoholic. Clocking in at 148 minutes, SPECTRE is just too long and could have easily been edited down to help with those pesky pacing issues.

I assure you that under those terms, Spectre is dandy, even as it fools around with Blofeld and Quantum and SPECTRE and a bunch of other table stakes that the past ten years of the franchise have brought into play. After likening returning to the series to slitting his wrists, there are hints that Craig’s views have softened.

The sketch sees Bond becoming increasingly frustrated as Colbert’s character tells him: “We all have things to do” – before failing to find his name on the system, leaving 007 to become steadily more frustrated.

The speculation surrounding Mendes’ finality coincides with the end of the Bond franchise’s deal at Sony, which is set to expire after the release of “Spectre”.