Sam Mendes’s Skyfall marked the first time a James Bond film hit the billion dollar mark, so it makes total sense that recent report from The Playlist has claimed the director is fairly close to signing on to the next installment of the series.
Sam Mendes expressed explicit hesitation to returning to the next James Bond film, primarily due to the amount of time it would take to make it a hypothetical Skyfall II. However, the idea of making back-to-back films has been completely trashed, getting Sam Mendes’s commitment up to “75 per cent.” What’s more, John Logan has already began working the same magic he worked to pen Skyfall, which is probably encouraging to Mendes’s involvement.
Similarly, this past fall, star Daniel Craig claimed a followup plan was truly “impossible” when stating, “We can only do them one at a time, they take six months to shoot. You can’t write one movie thinking about the next. All we’re trying to do is get the next one sorted out and it’ll stand on its own and if I’m able I’ll do another one after that.”
Bringing back the same team that made Skyfall a billion dollar hit just makes too much sense from a business perspective. Reuniting an obviously stellar combination of Sam Mendes, John Logan and Daniel Craig would, without a doubt, be the most lucrative thing to do as a studio exec. As such, you’d probably want to do anything to make one of the three as happy as possible.
John Logan has already started a treatment for the script, and the next logical piece of the production would be the hiring of a director. All Bond fans seemed to relish in Skyfall‘s success, so they’ll be hoping Sam Mendes is the man that gets the call. Be sure to check back for updates.
