Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Somebody won and somebody lost, but \u2014 unusually for a story about James Bond \u2014 it\u2019s hard to say who. Eon Productions handed over creative control of 007 films to Amazon MGM Studios; Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson ceded their stewardship of Ian Fleming\u2019s character to whatever team Amazon puts in place. It could be James Gunn directing Henry Cavill, or Kathryn Bigelow helming an Idris Elba movie. As with so much of 2025, the future is a mystery.\u00a0But perhaps it was a mystery before, too. The report is that Broccoli \u2014 the defining tonal instinct of Bond since taking over from her father Albert \u201cCubby\u201d Broccoli with Wilson in 1995 \u2014 had no concrete plan for where to go next. A franchise declared dead in the early 2000s and then revitalised by Daniel Craig\u2019s ambiguous, sometimes self-hating hero is once again a notion written at the top of a whiteboard. What if Bond\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. what? Is there a next iteration in the age of Bourne, Reacher and Kingsman? Did Eon lose a war of attrition, or did Amazon pay some version of a billion-dollar price tag for the right to clear the table after the feast?I should own up: apart from being an avid follower of Bond gossip, I also have a role in running a literary estate. My father was John le Carr\u00e9, creator of George Smiley (whether you prefer him in the person of Sir Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman) and The Night Manager (Tom Hiddleston). When Dad died in 2020, he left us a literary legacy of 26 novels. He also charged us (tongue, I promise, firmly in cheek) with a minor duty common to many writers\u2019 last wishes: his literary executors \u2014 these being his sons \u2014 should please do their best to secure his work\u2019s renown in perpetuity, find new audiences to admire his prescience and in so far as possible make him even more famous in death than in life. Thus our commercial and moral responsibilities are aligned, and he gets to poke fun at himself and us from the writers\u2019 smoke-filled and whiskied hereafter.While both Bond and Smiley are spies, the properties are radically at odds. Bond is explosive, seductive and charming, and his solutions to evil are best left in the realm of fantasy; Smiley is thoughtful, wise and melancholic, a rebuke to shooting your problems \u2014 but at the same time a man without answers beyond a stalwart, perhaps doomed determination to do the best and most human thing. They require different creative treatment \u2014 but throw up the same dilemma: the tension between control and innovation, which inevitably is also a conversation about IP and about the core philosophy of an estate.\u00a0By dint of some good fortune, but really as a result of decades of tough negotiation by my father and his advisers, the le Carr\u00e9 IP grid \u2014 the roster of rights held \u2014 is remarkably coherent and unencumbered. Most estates find themselves part-owners of their legacy at best, often with a complex and moth-eaten blanket of rights. Not here: one way and another, all the significant IP is accessible or just outright owned by the estate\u2019s commercial vehicle, John le Carr\u00e9 Ltd, run by my other half, Clare.\u00a0JLC\u2019s most important partnership \u2014 it\u2019s more a symbiosis \u2014 is with The Ink Factory, the film and TV mini-studio founded by my brothers Simon and Stephen in 2010, which created 2016\u2019s hit The Night Manager and is even now making the second season. The Ink Factory has a rolling arrangement to make adaptations of the le Carr\u00e9 corpus, while JLC can commission novels, comic books and in theory stranger offerings such as tea towels. Acting in concert we \u2014 the literary executors \u2014 can do anything we need to: we can play with the Circus in 2025 or go back to Smiley\u2019s wartime mission into Germany in 1944. The Ink Factory\u2019s Hindi-language Night Manager \u2014 with a new script that is true to the original book and the English-language show but belongs to itself and to its new setting \u2014 became one of Disney+ Hotstar\u2019s most streamed shows.When the new Circus novel Karla\u2019s Choice came out in October last year (another confession: I wrote it), it also refocused attention on the Smiley books as a whole. Next year we\u2019ll publish The Circus: Losing Control in partnership with Dark Horse Comics. There are other projects in the works that hew more or less closely to the source material and broaden the reach of the le Carr\u00e9 worlds; we look to do things that are recognisably le Carr\u00e9 even as they are recognisably new. We have faith that the brilliance of the original writing means the stories have a human truth in them which is portable and can find new contexts. Each of those contexts can then feed the source, which begins the process again.That\u2019s critical, because the commercial challenge for any creative estate is simple to the point of stark: will the audience decline, or increase? In the vast majority of cases, it will be the former. Even more today than ever before, it matters to have a Next Thing, and definitionally, most estates do not. Some, however, may be able to achieve a kind of escape velocity where new audiences accept and adopt new stories and go back to explore the existing canon, and the reach of the material grows. It\u2019s the holy grail which iconic persistent fictional universes have mastered: permanence through change. Dr No came out in 1962, which makes onscreen Bond a little older than Star Trek and Smiley\u2019s first cinematic outing. That\u2019s respectable, but the first Dracula movie was Nosferatu in 1922 and Sherlock Holmes made his screen debut in 1916.\u00a0So, how do you present, interpret, remake or reframe the material in a new generation? Broccoli\u2019s answers worked, but Eon resisted the universification of Bond \u2014 unlike in the world of books, in the cinematic and TV context there has been until now no wider narrative: no Moneypenny spin-off, no shadowy betrayal drama in M\u2019s Whitehall. Conversely, the Fleming family can tell new tales in print, but have no access to the screen. After a certain point you have to be willing to embrace the new or \u2014 as Eon has done \u2014 let someone else have a go, not just for commercial reasons but for creative ones. Peter Parker (you may recognise the name) has to share space with Miles Morales.\u00a0\u00a0In the golden age of PolyGram Entertainment, chief executive Michael Kuhn insisted that each project had to be signed off by each department before greenlighting. The creative team must feel they understood it and wanted it, the finance team must know how they would pay for it, the sales team what they would make from it and the marketing team how they would present it. The result was a disproportionate number of hits. Our process across media is not ultimately dissimilar and relies on another intangible almost as elusive as art: trust. For all that our advisers are vital, this is a family enterprise, not because it employs family or is owned by family, but because making it work requires familial relationships in the best possible mode.\u00a0The question inherent in the media landscape and the deals of the past few years, however, is whether we ultimately win by knowing when to step back, as Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson have just done. At a certain point, our obligation to secure the cultural legacy is discharged and it\u2019s only by letting a narrative go that you can see it grow. Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes are permanent characters in the modern pantheon partly because they have been adopted and reimagined by hundreds of storytellers.\u00a0Would we give up the creative intricacies of this era-defining, genre-defining, prescient fictional pantheon? Relax the constant whirring engine of management, from the style of the Bulgarian cover design to the tone of the Simplified Chinese translation to meetings with networks, and say \u201cenough\u201d? It demands a lot, but it gives back more. It can be whetstone, launch pad, main event, incubator, even vocation. As a business proposition, it\u2019s unique. As a life, it\u2019s fascinating. I suppose, yes, you can see why you\u2019d let go \u2014 but it would have to be a hell of a deal.\u00a0Nick Harkaway\u2019s most recent novel is \u2018Karla\u2019s Choice\u2019Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Somebody won and somebody lost, but \u2014 unusually for a story about James Bond \u2014 it\u2019s hard to say who. Eon Productions handed over creative control of 007 films to Amazon MGM Studios; Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson ceded their stewardship<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":233132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-233131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233133,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233131\/revisions\/233133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}