BOND 25 Might Be Coming To A Boyle

Today Variety dropped the technically-not-seismic news that Eon and MGM and Annapurna* want a name director for Bond 25, and that topping their list is Oscar winner Danny Boyle.

Boyle is an exciting choice. Though he continues the franchise’s trend of chasing “respectable” helmers, Boyle has just enough genre/exploitation bona fides to raise hopes that Daniel Craig’s swan song won’t be a stuffy, overly serious endeavor.

Plus Boyle’s directed Bond before! This little vignette, which opened the 2012 Olympics, was crafted by the director:

I think the celebrating is a little premature though, as Eon & Co. wanting Boyle doesn’t mean he’ll do it. No offer has been made, according to Variety. And Boyle has actually said in the past he wouldn’t take the gig (well-remembered by Jeff Sneider):

They’re not really for me. The budgets are too big. I’m better working at a lower level of money really because I like that discipline of not having enough money to pull off whatever it is you want to pull off.  So I wouldn’t be the best person to do those. No.

Should he change his mind, Boyle is certainly a choice worth getting amped about, and his involvement would attract an equally exciting roster of talent on both sides of the camera (but probably not the Queen this time). Best of all, it would send Craig out of the franchise with some legitimate filmmaking muscle behind the effort; we couldn't ask for more than that. 

*Last year, the MGM/Annapurna deal announcement went out of its way to say that the deal didn’t specifically cover the Bond franchise, and an announcement about that would come later. It never did, but as my colleague James Shapiro speculates, "why (else) would you do a deal with MGM without Bond? To distribute remakes?"