Every summer, I face an empty screen, poised to write a new comedy script for our annual Crazy Christmas Show. This year, I decided it was time to write the next Bond movie – but, in our case, it will not be on screen, it will be – live on stage!
Bond turns 70 next year, and the 27 Bond films starring 7 different actors, had the famous spy combating nuclear fear in the 60s, drug cartels in the 80s, and cyber terrorism in the 2000s.
In those early Bond films, the villains had private armies and secret hideouts. They wanted to control the world, but only after explaining their plan in detail to Bond, before failing to kill him. Those bad guys were over-the-top, theatrical, and usually bald.
Talking of bald, brings to mind Jeff Bezos, billionaire, new owner of the Bond franchise, and Bond villain material. The world used to be run by presidents and prime ministers. Today, a new elite has emerged—private citizens with private jets, private rockets, and, more scarily, private influence over public affairs. This Billionaire Club are no longer just doing business, they are a group of geopolitical players, unelected, but unmistakably in charge. With fortunes exceeding the wealth of entire nations, Jeff Bezos Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel are re-shaping the rules of politics and space exploration. These men don’t need to become powerful. They already are. The question is what kind of power do they have—and what will they do with it? They are all potential Bond villains.
For my script, I selected one of them to be my Bond villain, and you may guess which one when I tell you that I named him Felon XFusk (“fusk” is the Danish word for a “cheat” ). Unlike earlier Bond villains, XFusk is not hiding away on a remote island surrounded by bikini-clad girls. He is openly organising the Billionaire’s Club to invest in his elite-only colonisation of Mars. XFusk is not sitting on a swivel chair stroking a cat, he is tweeting memes that move stock markets . His best buddies are his 4-year-old son, XLGBTQ, and his own personal robot, Bot-Op, who calls him “Emperor Felonius”. What is Fusk’s evil plan? Without any spoilers, let me just say that he is a villain with an evil goal that will endanger the future of the entire planet.
It is enjoyable to create a crazy comedy show based on how Bond would combat a modern-day villain. When Ian Fleming created Bond, the enemies were clear: soviet agents and Cold War chaos. The Broccoli movie franchise then presented sophisticated Bonds standing up to power-crazed lunatics. In his decades-long career, hr has defused nuclear bombs, escaped shark tanks, and outwitted megalomaniacs. But, in our digitised age, Bond cannot win a battle with bullets. What can 007 do armed with an exploding pen against a tech billionaire who can launch rockets into space, create AI super-intelligences, buy social media platforms on a whim, and play kingmaker in global politics?
Today, democracy is manipulated via social media algorithms and misinformation campaigns, which means that MI6 faces a profound question: What does it mean to defend the “free world” when the battlefield is virtual, and the weapons are retweets, and deep-fakes? It’s not just world domination, it’s democracy that’s at stake. Bond may have started as a spy with a license to kill, but today, he is fictionally the last line of defence against unaccountable power in private hands.
So here’s to James Bond 2025: courtesy of the Crazy Christmas Show – smart, socially conscious, bald head (concealed with a wig), ready to take down tyranny – one billionaire at a time. Bond villains should be aware that when their evil plan includes the collapse of democracy, they deserve to be blasted off the planet by a man who just ordered a martini – shaken and stirred with a slice of silliness, and armed with an exploding pen. As he says, “the writing’s on the wall”.
