Amazon reveals first details about next James Bond as it narrows down hunt for the new 007

Mr. Bond, we are expecting you — so please can you hurry up and get here already? The next take on Britain’s most famous spy got a major jolt in the arm last month when it was announced Amazon had wrestled full creative control over the James Bond franchise from old-school owners EON Productions, with real-life Blofeld Jeff Bezos wasting no time in turning the quest to find the new 007 into a crowdsourcing exercise.

This extremely internet-age approach to casting one of cinema’s most iconic roles left Bondian purists concerned Amazon was going to rip up the rulebook altogether and cast some wildly left-field choice in the part. Forget Henry Cavill and Tom Hardy, what about Timothée Chalamet as the young, American Bond we didn’t know we needed? Heck, sticking with the Dune cast, why not Zendaya? While there’s still no telling exactly who Amazon is thinking of to play 007 No. 7, at least we now know two ways in which the age of the Bezos Bond will stick with tradition.

Amazon confirms two things about James Bond that will never change

According to the Daily Mail, Amazon has shared an internal memo with its staff which attempts to downplay any scurrilous stories swirling about how the company might be planning some wild things for Bond. In doing so, this reveals two defining traits that 007 will continue to possess despite his new corporate overlords.

“There have been so many erroneous rumours about the future of Bond,” the memo reads. “Amazon is committed to keeping the spirit of Bond alive and that means he has to be British or from the Commonwealth – and he has to be male.”

There are a lot of people who will be pleased about that first point – former 007 Pierce Brosnan himself included, as Daniel Craig’s predecessor recently told The Telegraph that Bond must not be an American in order to retain the core essence of the character. Similarly, the second stipulation should help former producer Barbara Broccoli — who relinquished control to Amazon after all things Bond had been in her family’s hands since 1962 — convince herself she did the right thing. Broccoli had always maintained that Bond had to be a man, despite increasing talk of a potential gender-flipped reimagining of the secret agent.

Clearly, Amazon understands that it’s the Britishness of Bond that is, ironically, what makes him such an internationally appealing protagonist. A female 007, meanwhile, could be an intriguing experiment one day, but given the backlash against the likes of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who and Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel in recent years — for simply daring to be women leads in traditionally male-fronted franchises — Amazon was never going to potentially doom its reboot from the off with such a divisive decision.

So, there we have it. The next Bond will be a man and will come from somewhere in the Commonwealth, which means we can officially narrow down the contenders to about… 1.3 billion people. A number that is, coincidentally, roughly how much Amazon paid off the Broccolis with in order to get its hands on Bond. Not that the company needed another franchise in its pocket considering it domination of commerce across the world. But I guess the world was not enough.