Time has not been kind to one of cinema’s all-time great franchises, at least depending on who you ask

A franchise doesn’t remain at the forefront of popular culture for 60 years by churning out a string of forgettable, formulaic, and/or terrible additional installments, but cinematic sacrilege may be getting committed in front of everyone’s eyes as the James Bond back catalogue comes under scrutiny.

Pretty much every single one of the 25 installments to date are products of their time in one way or another, and we even include the far-fetched likes of Moonraker and Die Another Day in the conversation, seeing as they clearly exist to capitalize on the post-Star Wars boom for sci-fi and the onslaught of CGI-driven blockbuster spectacle respectively.

A Reddit thread has certainly ruffled the feathers of the 007 diehards out there, after it was put forth that everything up to and including the end of the Roger Moore era is are “all varying degrees of stupid and badly made”. As you can imagine, that opinion hasn’t gone down as being too palatable among those with soft spot for MI6’s finest.

Obviously, watching an action movie made somewhere the 1960s and the mid-1980s is hardly going to come across as cutting-edge when viewed in 2022, but the best Bond adventures are indisputably timeless. Sure, they reflect society and the time and certain elements can be interpreted as somewhat unpalatable, but calling them “stupid” and “badly made” feels like an unfair generalization.

After all, the likes of Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, The Man with the Golden Gun, and others aren’t lauded as all-time classics to this day for no reason. The discourse has left the fandom both shaken and stirred in equal measure, then, but it may just spur on a rewatch of the entire saga from start to finish in certain supporters.