‘Bond’s audience will be patient’: Amazon MGM Studios’ boss on the hunt for a new 007

If there is anyone who knows what is happening behind the scenes in the saga over who will become the next James Bond, it’s Jennifer Salke, the global head of Amazon MGM Studios – home of box-office crown jewels including the 007 and Rocky franchises.

Salke was part of the Amazon team that sealed an audacious $8.5bn deal in 2021 to buy the 100-year-old MGM and its celebrated library of 4,000 film titles and 17,000 hours of TV programming – ranging from Gone with the Wind and The Hobbit to The Handmaid’s Tale and Legally Blonde.

Nevertheless, it is the future of the evergreen spy that remains the hottest topic of conversation among movie fans.

The problem is that control of James Bond – at 62 years old, one of the world’s longest-running film franchises – remains largely with Eon Productions in the UK, which is run by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson. Eon’s strict control even extends to who plays Bond.

Intense media interest has sparked a flurry of speculation naming almost any male actor who might fit the profile – from Idris Elba to Aaron Taylor-Johnson and, more recently, Barry Keoghan, the star of the Amazon hit Saltburn.

Daniel Craig’s last outing as the superspy hit cinemas in 2021, six months after Amazon announced the deal to buy MGM, and, three years on, fans are no closer to knowing who his replacement is.

Salke is neither shaken nor stirred by the hiatus. “There are a lot of ideas [about potential actors] that have popped up that I thought are interesting,” says Salke. “I think there are a lot of different ways we can go. We have a good and close relationship with Eon and Barbara and Michael. We are not looking to disrupt the way those wonderful films are made. For us, we are taking their lead.

“The global audience will be patient. We don’t want too much time between films, but we are not concerned at this point.”

Daniel Craig as Bond aims a pistol at someone off camera

Salke also gives her version of reports alleging that, early on, she got on the wrong side of Broccoli for raising the idea of a Bond TV series.

“It was never really raised in that way,” says Salke, who is conducting the interview via video at an unearthly hour in the morning from her home in Los Angeles.

“When you are looking at iconic intellectual property like that, you look at what the entire long-term future might be. Of course you look at every facet.”

She adds that the MGM deal – designed to vastly increase Amazon’s library in the streaming wars – was “definitely uncharted waters for me”.

Salke’s main office is at Culver Studios in California, which once housed Cecil B DeMille’s operations and where classics such as Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane were filmed, but she spends about a week a month travelling to parts of Amazon’s film and television empire.

Last week, she was in the UK and acknowledges the increasingly important role it is playing in Amazon’s international film and TV strategy.

Earlier this year, Amazon officially opened its exclusive studio space at Shepperton, where it has shot the third season of The Devil’s Hour. Alongside Netflix, it has made the Surrey film studio complex the second largest in the world.

And in July, Amazon acquired Bray Studios in Berkshire, once home of Hammer Films, to be the production HQ for its $1bn-plus Lord of the Rings TV series The Rings of Power, and the spy thriller Citadel.

“We are increasing our investment in the UK,” she says. “There is a lot coming out of here and it started feeling very obvious to me we needed to sort out boots-on-the-ground relationships. We work as close collaborators; I’m not meddlesome, I’m not here to babysit.”

Salke was responsible for the surprise decision to move production of The Rings of Power to the UK from New Zealand, which has history as the production home of big-screen adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s books.

She says the decision was partly based on the “homesick factor” for stars and overseas crew, due to the country’s remoteness – a feeling exacerbated by tight travel restrictions while filming during the pandemic. “We were running into a lot of issues, people feeling like they needed to be able to get home,” she says. “And as we started to invest more in the UK, it made sense to move.”

Salke began her career in television, starting out at Aaron Spelling Productions in the early 1990s, when shows such as Melrose Place were taking off. She moved to 20th Century Fox Television during the period in which shows including Prison Break, 24 and Modern Family became hits.

In 2018, Salke joined Jeff Bezos’s Amazon empire from NBCUniversal’s entertainment division, where she had helped revive the fortunes of the lacklustre streaming service Peacock with hits such as This Is Us.

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Part of the reason for Salke’s most recent visit to London was to host an all-female content showcase. At the event, she said that more than 50% of Prime Video’s global original TV series and films so far this year were from female creators and directors or had majority female leads.

Salke has also had to manage the staff response to Amazon’s recent edict that employees will have to work in the office five days a week starting next year. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, published a blogpost arguing that it could result in droves of staff leaving, particularly in certain demographics such as women, “making for a white, young, male workforce”.

“[There has been] a kind of mixed response, which is understandable,” she says. “We’re really just going back to where we were [pre-Covid]. It’s not some regimented ‘you must be in the office five days a week’. But we expect the company to operate as an in-office workplace as we did. We want people to feel connected to a team.”

The topic of gender parity, and the wider theme of leadership, resonates strongly with Salke.

“I do think I am a little unique in the fact I am a very transparent, warm leader,” she says. “I demand integrity and honesty, I’m very much a no-bullshit leader as well as a no-bullshit person. I have a strong meter for that. I show up as myself and I am as honest as I can possibly be.”