What Shatterhand Title Means For Next James Bond Movie

A recent report from The Playlist suggests that the screenplay is currently being rewritten by The Bourne Ultimatum’s Scott Z. Burns, who has made a name for himself as a top emergency script doctor having worked on the likes of Ocean's 12 and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He knows how to get business done, in other words, but his link to the Bourne franchise and the suggestion of an amnesiac spy will send shudders down some spines.

The rebirth of Bond with Casino Royale already owed a significant amount to the Bourne franchise as it is. The frenetic shooting style that Paul Greengrass used to such success in that franchise set a roadmap for pulling Bond away from the stuffy, silly waters that Pierce Brosnan's Bond was wading in by the end. To then use a storyline so similar to Bourne's entire arc would probably be asking for trouble.

Then again, that's the kind of thing mega brands do. Apple brings out "innovations" with every new generation of their tech that someone else already invented in previous years and Disney and Pixar have something of a habit of repackaging stories and claiming them as their own. The studio could quite reasonably just claim that Robert Ludlum had borrowed the amnesiac spy story from them in the first place. But that wouldn't be very befitting of a gentleman spy, would it?

The other pitfall Fukanaga needs to avoid is both retreading the waters of Spectre, which introduced Blofeld under a secret alias and also falling once more into the murky waters of Star Trek Into Darkness' Khan deception. Just as Paramount insisted vehemently that there was no way Benedict Cumberbatch was going to be playing Khan, we were already told in the run-up to Spectre that Waltz wasn't Blofeld. He was Franz Oberhauser, a completely different character, and everyone should stop talking about it.

If Shatterhand is to be the title and Blofeld is the villain, Fukunaga needs to just lay those cards on the table straight away. We don't want to see any more lying to deflect the true nature of that title and we shouldn't have to jump through the same hoops only to find out that Waltz's Blofeld is the big bad once again. If he's using it as a disguise, just allow it to be one he's duping the world within the movie with. Not us. Not Bond. We've been through that enough.

All-in-all, there's definitely something to be said for using some of the story elements from On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice again to tie up both Blofeld's story and Craig's time as Bond. It's just going to be a matter of avoiding repetition too much and skipping past some of the mistakes of the past.

And then once it's all done and Craig wanders off to the great spy retirement home in the sky with a sore head and no idea who he is (possibly), we can all start the conversation on who is going to replace him. Or you know, we could just do what everyone does and say it'll be Idris Elba and have done with it?