I’ve yet to read Sebastian Faulk’s Bond novel Devil May Care, it’s on my “to read list” but I was impressed by the reviews of Faulk’s novel and extremely impressed by his decision to write the book in the style of Ian Fleming. It certainly generated that nice kind of buzz that had been vacant from the Bond novels for years.

I said when the book came out it would only be a matter of time until EON picked up the film rights as the title is so pure Bond and it’s a tempting source of new material for a character whose literary works have all but been dried up at this point.

I mean look at the name of the new film – Quantum of Solace. They have even ran out of Bond titles to use!

Surprisingly though the news came this week from James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson that they had decided NOT to pick up the film rights to the novel.

They told Variety…

“We love the book, but because it is set in the 1960s, we haven’t considered making it in the near future,”

Though of course it doesn’t take a genius to straight away see the fault with that statement. The glaring, massive, undeniable and blatant contradiction that must now be discussed. Faulks himself said it to The Independent…

“I would have thought that if you could move Casino Royale from the 1950s you could move Devil May Care from the Sixties.”

It’s said that both the Ian Fleming estate and Faulks himself have not given up hope on seeing their work transformed onto the big screen, though of course the character is not like Sherlock Holmes where it is without copyright and you don’t need to ask permission to make a movie on the character.

The project could not be setup at rival studio’s with other producers and it’s been that way since the 1950’s. And even by some miracle they did, it’s the movie studio who own the gun barrel sequence, the 007 alias, the James Bond name and everything else that makes Bond…Bond on film. These are mostly cinematic aspects not in Fleming’s work and are exclusive to MGM.

That is not to say the book couldn’t be adapted as a movie in the spirit of Bond. They could do what Hitchcock did in the 50’s and make something like North by Northwest which clearly is massively influenced by Fleming’s work but it’s unlikely a movie studio would take that option or that Faulks would be interested.

He is a smart man. They must know the Bond team will come crawling one day.

Thanks to Commander Bond for being the awesome source of information for all things 007!