Amazon is currently cooking up the future of the James Bond franchise, with screenwriter Steven Knight and director Denis Villeneuve confirmed, but there’s still no official casting choice for Agent 007. As details remain heavily under wraps, the one film that could serve as a lesson for Amazon MGM in how to reboot the series has found success again. More than 30 years after its original release, one of the best James Bond movies ever made has become one of the biggest movies on streaming.
‘GoldenEye’ Made James Bond Great Again
The film is GoldenEye, the 1995 official reboot of the spy thriller franchise featuring a new Bond and a fresh narrative style. It follows Bond as he’s tasked with finding GoldenEye, a satellite weapon capable of knocking out specific power grids and causing an economic collapse. Agent 007’s former partner, whom he thought was dead, is now operating under the name Janus, and he becomes Bond’s main target on his quest to restore peace.
GoldenEye was the first movie featuring Pierce Brosnan as Bond. It marked the end of a long hiatus, during which the franchise was mired in development hell because of rights disputes. Brosnan replaced Timothy Dalton in the role of the charming spy, with Judi Dench also starting her long run as M. Desmond Llewelyn returned as Q, becoming the only actor to portray the same Bond character across multiple decades.
The film also starred Sean Bean, Famke Janssen, Izabella Scorupco, Joe Don Baker, Alan Cumming, Minnie Driver, and Robbie Coltrane. It was directed by Martin Campbell (who also directed Casino Royale years later) and written by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein, who penned the first Bond film not directly based on Ian Fleming’s works.
Released in November 1995, GoldenEye was the franchise reset that the series needed. It grossed more than $356 million against a $60 million production budget, becoming one of the year’s highest-grossing movies. The critical reception was also highly positive, with many highlighting Brosnan’s ability to reignite love for a franchise, as he drew in enough viewers to confirm that a Bond audience still existed after all. Today, it holds an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the highest-rated film of Brosnan’s run as Agent 007. GoldenEye also served as inspiration for the hit Nintendo 64 video game GoldenEye 007, now regarded as one of the best games of all time.
31 Years Later, ‘GoldenEye’ Soars on Streaming
All these years after officially rebooting the franchise with a new Bond, GoldenEye has found success again. As Amazon continues to develop the reboot and hide whoever will play the spy, viewers are revisiting previous Bond movies, sending the 1995 entry to the top of the charts. At the time of this writing, GoldenEye sits at No. 5 on Vudu’s top-10 list of most-watched movies on VOD. Other popular and more recent titles in the list include two Super Mario movies, Minions & Monsters, Toy Story 5, and The End of Oak Street.
