When you’re looking for the ninth of the James Bond films on Amazon Prime Video, don’t be surprised if, sometime in the near future, it’s listed as “The Man with the Golden G**” or “The Man with the Golden Thing That Hurts People.”
In the least surprising entertainment news this autumn — and this includes the fact that critics loved a meh, bloated adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s worst novel by director Paul Thomas Anderson mostly because it lionized far-left terrorism — Amazon, which now has significant control over the back catalogue of Bond films, has edited the gun out of 007’s hands in the posters for the films.
The changes were first noticed on a viral scale by the official social account of spy movie podcast SpyHards:
So, Amazon has digitally removed firearms from the key art on all the James Bond movies on its platform…
Shocking if you ask me, but what are your thoughts on the choice? pic.twitter.com/oP4sGE7XSr
— SpyHards – A Spy Movie Podcast (@SpyHards) October 3, 2025
It gets worse if you look at the lot of them:
Here’s all of them. Yikes. pic.twitter.com/Iv4LIhxM1F
— SpyHards – A Spy Movie Podcast (@SpyHards) October 3, 2025
The posters were uploaded last week to Prime Video, at least in the United Kingdom, according to The Standard.
“Posters for Spectre, GoldenEye, A View to a Kill, and Dr. No had all been subtly altered, guns edited out, hands cropped, and in some cases, bodies stretched awkwardly to cover up the missing weapons,” the outlet reported.
“The alterations were particularly noticeable in the Spectre poster, where Daniel Craig’s hand holding a gun was cropped out entirely. In A View to a Kill, Roger Moore’s figure seemed unnaturally elongated to compensate for the missing firearm… After a few days of heated online debate, Amazon quietly reverted the images, swapping them out for alternative artwork. Interestingly, the replacement posters still avoid showing Bond with a gun, although some fans were relieved to see the most egregious edits disappear.”
Amazon acquired significant rights to the Bond film franchise when it purchased MGM, the studio which produced almost all of the films, in an $8.5 billion deal in 2022.
Even then, the future of the Bond franchise was in a bit of limbo, given that creative control of the franchise was in the hands of what the BBC charitably called, in an April article, “the notoriously protective Broccoli family.” (They had a reason to be “notoriously protective,” as we’ll see once we delve a little deeper into this.)
But Amazon pulled off another coup earlier this year by getting creative control of the future of the British super-spy franchise for what was reportedly another cool $1 billion.
From the BBC:
We still don’t know who the next James Bond will be, but 007’s new owners, Amazon MGM, say they are hard at work on the next film in London and that they will offer a “fresh” take on the franchise and honor the “legacy of this iconic character.”
After getting a glance at those bowdlerized Bond posters, I fully expect that “fresh” take to look something like this:
Why worry about gun violence, after all, when the “fresh” new Bond always “misses it by that much?”
Well, yes, it’s all fun and games until nobody gets hurt, which is precisely where Amazon seems to want to take the franchise. He can deal with Auric Goldfinger via mediation, or understand that Dr. No means no. The possibilities for parody are endless:
I fixed it pic.twitter.com/RGPBlBbIbj
— BusterNutt Video (@pmtwreckhouse) October 4, 2025
Unfortunately, the funny part is less humorous when you realize that there are still entertainment giants willing to pay and lose billions to rope you into their brand of groupthink.
“Woke Bond” ain’t gonna make money, at least not like they’re hoping. If anything, this chases people off Amazon Prime Video. But why do they care? Seriously, they don’t.
While the Broccoli family may have finalized the deal to sell off the rights to Amazon, an insider said that family scioness Barbara Broccoli didn’t trust the company and thought this way about the SuperMegaCorp Inc., according to a source in a report in The Wall Street Journal last December: “These people are f***ing idiots.”
They’d apparently spent some time proving her right. The best anecdote from the very long article about how the Bezos algorithm factory plans on handling 007:
In the nearly three years since the deal closed, Amazon has produced one Bond-related product: a reality show, “007: Road to a Million,” that features teams competing in spy-themed challenges. (Broccoli has worked with Amazon on non-Bond projects, including the drama “Till” and a forthcoming update to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”) …
Still, work has begun on a second season. And with no clear direction of the Bond movie strategy, the show has become a venue for discussion within Amazon about the character’s place in the broader world, and whether the valorization of a dangerously violent, womanizing secret agent is what’s best for society today.
During a company meeting about the second season, an Amazon employee admitted her own misgivings.
“I have to be honest,” she said. “I don’t think James Bond is a hero.”
The room went silent.
The salient fact isn’t just the fact that she spoke it. Instead, it’s these two things:
- This woman is mental.
- There is nobody at this metastatic conglomerate willing to push back on this kind of madness and call her mental to her face. Instead: “The room went silent.”
This is how you get girlboss Snow White, nonbinary “Sesame Street” guests making R-rated jokes, and whatever the heck the Star Wars universe has degenerated into.
Yes, stuff like this now draws enough negative attention that people start to revolt. But at the very least, the fruit of the revolt won’t ripen for years to come, at least in the entertainment industry. The strikes drove out good creatives. COVID drove out good creatives. The witch-hunts run by the wokeistas drove out good creatives. And after all that, they know well enough to stay out. After all, why return to a La-La Land that would take Maverick’s fighter jet out of “Top Gun” and replace it with a 737 if they could, then rename it “Top Flight” to get the G-word out of the title?
But that’s at best. At worst, Amazon, Disney, Apple — they all don’t have to care. They’re huge enough that they can wear you down. That scold at the boardroom table saying she doesn’t think James Bond is a hero — she’s emboldened enough to speak her mind, and people won’t push back. That’s still woke showbusiness, baby. These people are not going to change until they realize they can’t change you. One election, one season of backlash, they can wait that out. Conservatives have yet to prove we can wait them out and push them back.
We can start with James Bond, one restored Walther PPK to a movie poster at a time.
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