By In 'things you didn't know you really wanted until you knew they weren't happening' news, Naomie Harris has revealed that her pitch for an Eve Moneypenny spin-off from the main James Bond franchise, helmed by Oscar-winning Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, has been shot down before it really got going.
"He's wanted to do a badass, kick-ass action thing with Moneypenny, which I’m all for," Harris told Good Morning America. "I got together with our producer, Barbara Broccoli, and was like 'Let’s make this happen.' But she wasn't so down for it. But maybe, one day, who knows. The conversation has started at least, and we're continuing it here."
This isn't the first time a Bond-born spin-off has been floated, only to sink without trace into the piranha tank. The broadly derided Die Another Day nearly brought us a series fronted by Halle Berry's Jinx, who would team up again with her boss Damian Falco, played by Reservoir Dogs' Michael Madsen. Michelle Yeoh's Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies was also slated to lead a spin-off.
In the end, neither happened. That's a bit of a shame, because there's so much potential to expand the Bond Cinematic Universe. If someone could print these out and post them to Barbara Broccoli, that'd be great.
006: Back In The USSR
If de-ageing technology can make Joe Pesci look 40 years younger, it can reconstruct a The Full Monty-era Sean Bean and flesh out what he was up to between being exploded by Bond's timebombs and popping up in the Soviet statue graveyard. The answer? He was starring in a fish-out-of-water comedy, in which the bluff Yorkshireman struggles to make a homebrew Henderson's relish and work out what 'Sheffield United nil' looks like in Cyrillic.
Do They Know It's Christmas Jones?
Two of Pierce Brosnan's accomplices have had their spin-offs axed, but there's still Dr Jones from The World Is Not Enough to work with. After being done serious violence by that all-timer of a honking one-liner – "I thought Christmas only came once a year" – this cross between Chernobyl and Men Behaving Badly would follow the nuclear physicist and her important work for the International Decommissioning Agency, while wading through half-formed Yuletide innuendoes. Something about stockings? We'll workshop it.
A workplace comedy set in MI5
Judi Dench sadly copped it in Skyfall, but we could jump back to the interim between then and Quantum of Solace for a wobblecam mock-doc. Her M never suffered fools, and watching her raze dithering civil servants with Malcolm Tucker-esque invective could sustain a couple of series. What's Jesse Armstrong doing right now?
Young Kincade, Dynamite Fisherman
There are a lot of unanswered questions around how exactly the Skyfall gamekeeper got up to with his stash of high explosives as a young man, but given the relative lack of The Man sniffing around his lochs, it's likely he was sitting in a rowing boat on his own, slowly exploding every damn fish in Scotland. This would take the form of an instructional YouTube series on dynamite fishing, featuring Young Kincade as played by Limmy.
The Best Exotic Many Bond Hotel
Simple one, this: the surviving Bond actors – Connery, Lazenby, Dalton and Brosnan – go on holiday in Mumbai and learn a lot about love, friendship and ageing with the help of Dev Patel. Perhaps the hardest to pull together, given the the franchise-melting paradox of its premise, but the existential pangs of four ageing men who suddenly realise they've got the same name, then bond over one-upping each other with forced quips, definitely has legs.
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