This coming Tuesday, February 12th, Sam Mendes’ Skyfall arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray, thus completing its staggeringly successful $1 billion-plus run around the globe. Now that the dust has settled around what many consider to be one of the very best James Bond films, it seems like as good a time as any to start thinking about the future of the franchise – especially when Skyfall itself put so many promising pieces in place for upcoming installments.
Even more importantly, Mendes’ film left Daniel Craig’s Bond in a place where he is ripe for further reinvention and experimentation. While I personally would like to see Mendes make at least one more film with Craig before departing the franchise – creative chemistry that successful is too good to pass up – Skyfall clearly left the door open for other filmmakers to come in and leave their own artistic stamp on the franchise. At the film’s conclusion, I can imagine this version of Bond going in many different directions, each of them as valid as the next, and it excites me to think about what other directors might bring to the series at this particular juncture.
Thus, I have assembled a list of the 10 contemporary directors I would personally be most interested in seeing tackle a James Bond movie. This is only a silly thought-exercise, of course, and I have no doubt most of these ideas will never come to fruition, but it can, after all, be fun to speculate. The list is unranked (so as not to enrage the Christopher Nolan fanboys if I failed to give him the #1 spot), arranged instead in alphabetical order.
Begin reading on the next page…