Amazon Is Digitally Erasing Guns from James Bond Posters
kotaku.comAs much as I can't stand censorship / Amazon / etc., has anyone actually taken the time to vet this story before voicing their outrage?
A cursory search online reveals only a single source [1]. Additionally searching on Amazon Prime for Bond movies shows PLENTY of poster/cover art with Bond holding his quintessential Walther PPK including Dr. No [2] which was mentioned in the article.
So unless this was leaked by an intern or maybe its being AB tested in various regions, this seems like a big fat nothing. I mean why single out James Bond? Why not Terminator, Predator... basically every Schwarzenegger movie in existence with the exception of Jingle All the Way.
[1] https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/amazon-prime-2025-r...
The new posters look oddly consistent with each other, but don't look any way close to the ones I could turn up on google images, so my guess is that they used AI to generate them, but for whatever reason the AI refuses to generate guns, hence lack of guns.
Yeah I did the same thing - running a reverse-image search for similar images with a date filter to find older ones and nothing came up.
Most GenAI models can do weapons without any complaints. For fun I recreated that same set of posters with Bond holding absurdly huge weapons.
Because Amazon now own the rights to James Bond
Perhaps I just feel old.. but I really, really wish they'd go back to making Bond films like Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, and the Man with the Golden Gun. No big explosions, just nice cars, suave hero, good stories, and all the spy gadgets and things many of us love.
Albert Broccoli had the formula right and IMHO we should go back.
It feels like with the meteoric success of Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" in 2005, every studio felt like they had to follow suit and make their movies "dark and edgy".
Personally, I wasn't a huge fan of the Daniel Craig reboot either. We already had a thousand overly serious spy thriller series at that point (Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible, etc.). Give me the almost cartoonishly villainous enemies, the outlandish technological gadgetry, and the punchy one-liners of the original James Bond movies any day.
Dark and edge movies. That's a good point. It felt like in television land, we had moved beyond the dark and foreboding Nordic Noir style programs and into something less dark. I liked Casino Royal, I thought that was as exciting of an action-Bond that I've seen.
For those of us who have invested in a chain or series for a long time, it may feel comfortable, predictable, and so when something changes it can burst the magical bubble of cinema. Perhaps that's the danger of film series that are basically the same, just a different story, whereas short periods before change conditions the audience to let go of a nostalgia, and keep plowing ahead because it's just enough of a change not to disrupt that comfort - yet modernizes etc.
too modern. As with a lot of series modernized, it may have the effect of taking something familiar, changing something that disrupts the.. nostalgia?
Hopefully the pendulum swings back. Reminds me of the pure evil vs relatable villain meme.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/evil
I used to be tired of simple villains, but now I’m tired of complex relatable ones.
Of course those ones were based on Ian Fleming novels of which there were a limited number.
In the new UK double oh agents are no longer licensed to kill, but they can post whatever they want on social media after a committee approves it.
The most humorous thing I read on the internet this week. ¡Gracias!
The source is nested through a couple of links.
https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/amazon-prime-2025-r...
Same source is reporting maybe a reversal:
Reloaded: Amazon Prime has ditched the gun-less AI artwork after fan backlash (October 4th)
https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/amazon-prime-2025-d...
They forgot the gun in the 007 logo. Rookie mistake!
Somewhat related New Yorker cartoon https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/friday-febr...
I might be a socialist, but when I was a kid, toy guns didn't even have orange tips until police became so trigger-happy and scared that they started shooting kids instead of teaching cops how to respond properly, and now we've arrived at revisionist and canceling vintage media like some Christian "family-friend" edited DVD rental service.
How utterly fucking pathetic.
I would be OK if they swapped it with a cucumber or a banana.
Why even get mad at this point? It's an "asset" like any other product. They bought the rights. I feel people in general are becoming "rational" actors too, by just ignoring the product if they don't like it.
At the end of the day, yes it's funny and stupid. Who cares? ignore them.
It's moreso about the general trend that's happening where everything must be sanitized and advertiser-friendly. Like, is it really that far-fetched for an action thriller movie, that contains guns and people using them, to also have a gun on the poster? Do we really need to protect society from that?
Plus, movie posters are art to a number of people. Someone very specifically chose the lighting, the expression, pose, and background to convey a message about the movie. But now it's being censored because "gun scary."
I, for one, don't welcome the bland, homogenized world that corporations are trying to turn everything into.
Nah, it has nothing to do with what you think.
Here's the real reason: https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/luigi-departs-from-m...
Look at that picture, look at the date of the article, then consider "that thing that happened".
There's something to be said about the culture of needing to find outrage or offense in every little thing, too.
The next movie will have guns. Wake me if the next movie doesn't have guns.