Just a little further update on last month's news from co-screenwriter Peter Morgan that the next James Bond film had been put on official studio hiatus as the debt-ridden MGM are currently up for sale, making pre-production tricky. In the February issue of Total Film Magazine (found via this site), producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli claim the future of the Bond franchise is "uncertain" and the whole sale of MGM has left their timeline in a bit of a flux. I'm guessing that post-Quantum of Solace, they really didn't expect NOT to be in production on Bond 23 by January 2010, and in truth were probably expecting to release the next film this November. MGM do expect to have some firm takeover offers sometime this month but as of right now, the only thing progressing is the age lines of Daniel Craig who is probably desperate to get in as many Bond movies as he can before he physically begins to look a bit old. Oh - that and the script, which Morgan along with the series writers Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, will have a little longer to develop and fine tune, which can only be a good thing on that side of things. Most seem to expect that filming on Bond will probably take place at the end of the year, for a release in late 2011, but when the producers use terms such as "uncertain", who knows for sure? Of course this isn't the first time a disruption like this has halted 007. Twenty years ago, problems over t.v. distribution rights between MGM and Danjag (parent company of EON) blocked all attempts to make a third movie with Timothy Dalton and it resulted in the longest gap between Bond movies, a massive six years between Licence to Kill and Goldeneye.