BOND 25 News: Purvis And Wade Will Return

When it comes to Bond news, Baz Bamigboye of the Daily Mail has such a strong track record that it often feels like he’s acting as a direct conduit for informal announcements from EON Productions. When he drops a story we pay attention, and while he hasn’t had a great deal to say about Bond 25 since director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge departed the project, today he reports that at least the latter vacancy has now been filled by the familiar team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

This will mark a seventh Bond outing for the duo who’ve written every Daniel Craig entry and isn’t really a surprise given that the official announcement of Bond 25 named them as its writers. Bamigboye reports the pair had a story treatment signed off before Boyle and Hodge became involved, and it’s this which will now be developed into a full script.

Going with a known quantity who know the franchise and the EON setup intimately is an eminently sensible move for a production which is really under a time crunch if it’s to make that announced 2019 release date, even if their output hasn’t always been so well-received (cough, Die Another Day). As Bamigboye points out, whatever form that final script takes will still be subject to any revisions demanded by whoever slides into that still-vacant director’s chair, but having at least a treatment to pitch to potential candidates should make that search easier, presuming they haven’t all been irredeemably put off by the prospect of being under the kind of tight creative control which has seemingly left the production with no concrete progress to show in the fourteen months since its announcement. Maybe another safe pair of hands is what’s needed here, too.

So, how does the prospect of another Purvis and Wade script strike you? Hopeful they can achieve some kind of redemption for past missteps or resigning yourself to Craig’s swansong being underwhelming? Chime in below.