James Bond: 10 Potential Spin-Offs And How They Would Work

During the discussion about the merits of a female Bond, the idea of an origin story for “M” has also been thrown around quite a bit. Some fans are quick to question why a female Bond would be necessary at all when we could just follow the early years of MI6 boss M (the Judi Dench version, rather than the Ralph Fiennes or earlier male incarnations).

How might it work? Though she's occasionally roped into the action like when she's imprisoned with a bomb in The World Is Not Enough or when Bond attempts to protect her at the end of Skyfall, we never get the impression M has done any kind of field work. So this would force a spin-off about M in her younger years to be a vastly different type of film. It's clear M's greatest qualities lie with her intelligence and ability to manipulate and co-ordinate, so why not go down a sort of “Sherlock Holmes” route?

That doesn't mean having M out on the streets attempting to solve mysteries, it means watching M utilize an agent or a team of agents in order to gather intelligence so she can piece together operations and get results.

When it comes down to it, Bond rarely knows more about a given task than M, so seeing things from her perspective – perhaps revealing that much of what an agent thinks they're doing of their own volition is carefully planned and adjusted without them even knowing it – would be massively entertaining.