Back to the Future

You can always tell the precise moment when a big movie franchise goes completely off the rails. It's never subtle. When George Clooney showed up with nipples on his Batsuit, it was all over. Or when Rocky settled the cold war. Or when Superman established world peace. Once Hannibal Lecter cut off the top of Ray Liotta's head and fed him his own brains, was there anything left to say? (Besides "eww.") In the James Bond series, Hollywood's longest-running franchise, Denise Richards was once cast as a nuclear physicist, and without just the right eyeglasses she never would've pulled it off. But the saga's tipping point, says Bond coproducer Michael Wilson, came during 2002's "Die Another Day," when Agent 007 got behind the wheel of an invisible car. "You tend to start drifting," he says. "We got a little too fantastical. We needed to re-engage the audience." But after 44 years, 20 films, five different Bonds and countless juvenile sexual puns--how? By pushing the reboot button on the entire franchise. In "Casino Royale," the new Bond film (debuting Nov. 17) that stars blond-haired, blue-eyed Daniel Craig, we'll learn how 007 earned his license to kill. "It's the story we've always wanted to tell," Wilson says.

Lately in Hollywood, it's the story that everyone wants to tell. So-called origin stories--how fill-in-the-blank became fill-in-the-blank--are all the rage. "Once upon a time, Frankenstein was [in a movie] battling Abbott and Costello. When it gets to that point, you've gotta start over," says horror auteur Rob Zombie, who's working on a reboot of the "Halloween" franchise. "These are iconic characters we're revisiting, and classic material stays classic." The "Star Wars" prequels and last summer's "Batman Begins" both struck gold tracing the rise of their A-list characters. In theaters now, you can find out everything you wanted to know about Leatherface ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning") but were afraid to ask. Next year, Michael Myers ("Halloween") and Jason Voorhees ("Friday the 13th") will also get the childhood treatment, as will Hannibal Lecter in February's "Hannibal Rising," which will explain why the infamous killer's taste for cannibalism might date back 60 years to the day when a Nazi soldier ate his little sister. Possibly with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

As long as risk reduction is the name of the game in Hollywood, studios see no point in giving up on brands that still hold currency with filmgoers. "When you have a title people recognize," says DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press, "part of your battle is already won." Ironically, playing it safe financially also provides studios with the cover to take creative risks. The director of "Hannibal Rising" is Peter Webber, whose only other feature, "Girl With a Pearl Earring," was an Oscar-nominated period piece about the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Webber chose Gaspard Ulliel, a French actor, to play the Anthony Hopkins role. "It's easy to look down on sequels and prequels and think you're getting into 'Police Academy 47'," says Webber. "But if this film did that, I wouldn't have gotten involved." "Hannibal Rising" will conveniently leave off well before the starting point of the previous Lecter films--so if it works, expect sequels to the prequel.

From a narrative perspective, origin stories are tricky because the audience comes in already knowing how they end. The drama must arise from the character's arc: discovering how this ordinary person transforms into someone extraordinary. "There can be tension in the telling," says Webber. "I can drive a car from New York to Los Angeles, but you don't know how I'm getting there--am I going through New Orleans or Chicago?" The usual strat-egy is to take iconography associated with the character and attach stories to it. In "Casino Royale," we discover that Bond won his beloved Aston Martin at a card table. Such details satisfy fans and help reel in new viewers who know little about these characters beyond their legend.

Of all the reboots on the horizon, "Casino Royale" is the riskiest because, unlike the others, the Bond franchise was still quite frisky. "Die Another Day" was the highest-grossing film of the entire series. "I'll tell ya, it's not something your partners at the studio relish--when you're coming off the biggest one ever and you tell them you're gonna break the mold," Wilson says. "But creatively, it's the right way to go. Who knows if it'll make as much money?" In "Casino Royale," the filmmakers take a character known for his suave nonchalance and make him, Wilson says, into "a grittier, tougher, darker kind of guy." The Bond of the film is the Bond of Ian Fleming's 1954 book: he smokes 70 cigarettes a day, drinks too much and, frankly, isn't all that jazzed about shooting people. It could work like a dream, or it could be a view to a buzzkill.

It's predictable for a franchise to reboot and go gritty. It's the logical corrective for a property that's gotten too bloated and silly. "They always say that," Press argues, "but look, I'm sure there will be plenty of explosions and cool cars and pretty women in the new Bond." There certainly will be, but the filmmakers were dead set on establishing that "Casino Royale" isn't the same old James Bond. "To set the tone, we wanted to start with something visceral and dynamic, and it ended up being a foot chase over the tops of buildings," says Robert Wade, a screenwriter on the film. "It shows him as raw and explosive, rather than a smooth operator." So no invisible cars this time? "And no space stations with lasers on them," says Neal Purvis, Wade's writing partner. "At least not for a few years."

© 2006