Jeff Bezos wants Lauren Sanchez "front and center" in the new James Bond.
James Bond is a cinematic institution. Whoever gets to be agent 007, and whether the latest release is successful, cannot be understated in how it shapes how insiders measure the health of the film industry -- but now the entire franchise is under Jeff Bezos' control, and he apparently wants his wife, Lauren Sanchez, to be the next Bond girl.
Much like most other things, Jeff Bezos now somehow has full creative control of the James Bond franchise. For decades, it was under the iron grip of the Broccoli family, who, like all protective dynasties, guarded it from overexposure and resisted the urge to tinker with its core identity.
That calm was shattered when Bezos reportedly paid the family a king's ransom to finally wrestle the franchise from their control. Immediately, worst fears about Bezos' unrestrained taste felt validated -- this is, after all, the man who once rented the city of Venice and a Vogue cover for his wedding. The Bond series had only just escaped the cartoonishly overblown tail end of Pierce Brosnan's tenure, and few fans want to revisit that fever dream.
Yet Bezos is allegedly pushing to cast Sanchez as the new Bond girl, whether the filmmakers like it or not. The movie will be helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the Dune director famed for coaxing career-best performances from Amy Adams to Timothée Chalamet. Now, he may have to work the same magic on Sanchez -- whose on screen résumé shows her range runs from "reporter" to "reporter playing a reporter."
The report comes from entertainment journalist Rob Shuter, who wrote on his Substack that Bezos is "obsessed" with making Sanchez a star. A source insisted, "This isn't just fantasy casting -- Jeff wants her on screen, period." Even more absurdly, Bezos supposedly wants Bond lore rewritten to put Sanchez "front and center," a baffling note Villeneuve will have to decode.
Fans online have already compared Bezos' pet project to Citizen Kane -- where a tycoon destroys his legacy forcing his wife into opera. Others joked Bezos might just cast himself as Bond. At this point, it wouldn't even be surprising. Villeneuve may have to be the one to wrestle the steering wheel away.
Nepotism is as old as Hollywood. Filmmakers hire who they trust -- usually friends, family, or whoever shows up to dinner most often. But this is something else entirely: a billionaire stamping himself onto culture simply because the bank balance says he can. Meanwhile, the company that bankrolls all this, Amazon, is busy gutting DEI programs in the name of "fairness."
If Bezos actually manages to convince the Academy Award-nominated director to cast his wife in the second most iconic role in the Bond franchise, fans will almost certainly revolt -- and it could even dent the film's bottom line. At the end of the day, when it comes to culture, the fans always have a bigger say than whoever writes the cheque, because each ticket is basically a vote.
By most critics' accounts, Villeneuve has yet to make a single bad movie -- he's adapted books deemed "unfilmable," and pulled off sequels that no one thought would work -- but surviving a film where Jeff Bezos is essentially the final boss might be the kind of mission even 007 would turn down.