It wasn’t lost on people around town that Jen Salke‘s name was not listed in any of the recent announcements that Amy Pascal and David Heyman would be taking over the James Bond franchise, or even that a deal had been reached with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to cede creative control. And less than a week after Pascal and Heyman were officially announced as the new stewards of the franchise, Salke was out at Amazon MGM Studios.
Salke had been with Amazon MGM since 2018, and she landed big hits like “Fallout,” “Reacher,” and “Jury Duty,” while also doubling down on some costly swings like “The Rings of Power” and “Citadel.” But analysis after analysis in the trades Friday believe her exit had all to do with James Bond. Amazon acquired MGM back in 2022, and in that span we’re no closer to knowing what happens to 007 after we left him on that island waiting for a missile strike at the end of “No Time to Die” in 2021.
Her ouster is being described internally as her choice, with Salke remaining on the lot with a new production entity that will have a first look film and TV deal. But some think she was pushed out. (Amazon MGM had no comment for this piece.)
So what happens to 007 now that Salke’s out? Rumblings that something was amiss date back to December, when the Wall Street Journal described Bond being locked in a stalemate between the studio and Broccoli and Wilson. It claimed Broccoli in private described Amazon execs as “f—ing idiots,” and that Bond 26 didn’t have a script, story, or Bond himself. Of Salke specifically, WSJ reported that Broccoli didn’t care for Salke referring to Bond as “content,” while Amazon MGM film chief Courtenay Valenti was described by the WSJ as the “Barbara whisperer.”
It’s Valenti, not Salke, who struck the deal to buy out Broccoli and Wilson and to whom Pascal and Heyman are now reporting. And according to Deadline, that was a stipulation the Broccolis had before Salke was formally out. And Amazon had to pay a big check in order to get that privilege, something in theory Salke would’ve been tasked with avoiding.
That seems to give Valenti a lot of power herself, but she has a big slate of as many as 12-14 movies released theatrically she has to worry about, something she and Salke promised at SXSW just ahead of her now heading to Las Vegas for CinemaCon. She’ll now be doing so as her own film head reporting directly to Amazon Video chief Mike Hopkins. It’s why both Deadline and THR in their assessment of Salke’s exit shared the rumor that yet another executive could be brought on board just to handle Bond.
Hopkins said in his memo yesterday that no replacement for Salke would be named, and they’d take a couple of weeks figuring out what the best new organizational structure is for the studio. Bond’s place in that could be as simple as another executive minding the store while Pascal (herself a former studio chief at Sony) and Heyman (who has managed an equally big franchise with Harry Potter) do the creative.
Or on the further end of the spectrum it could mean finding an executive crossing over between film and TV and someone with the overarching vision for everything 007. Marvel has Kevin Feige, DC has James Gunn and Peter Safran, Lucasfilm has Kathleen Kennedy. Is there a singular Bond whisperer out there capable of making a full slate of 007 projects? Amazon MGM also has to make the choice of whether it would want to give final cut and whole cloth to an auteur like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino to do whatever they want with Bond, and that may not line up with a corporatized vision.
Whatever happens, it feels like finding the next person to play James Bond will be the priority. We just know it won’t be Salke leading the search.
