The next 007 movie

[Frankie]

SKYFALL


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15558355

3 November 2011 Last updated at 08:07 ET

Bond film called Skyfall

By Tim Masters, Entertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News

The title of the 23rd James Bond film has been confirmed as Skyfall.

The latest 007 adventure will star Daniel Craig for the third time. Leading ladies have been confirmed as French actress Berenice Marlohe and Naomie Harris.

Skyfall is being directed by Sam Mendes, who won an Oscar for 1999's American Beauty.

Mendes said the storyline will take the secret agent to London, China, Turkey and Scotland.

It will see Bond's loyalty tested to M, his superior, while espionage headquarters MI6 faces an attack.

The movie, which sees the return of Dame Judi Dench as spy boss M, will also star Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Javier Bardem as the villain of the piece.

It will be released in the UK on 26 October 2012.

Craig told reporters in London that the cast would start filming sequences for the new movie later on Thursday.

Much speculation about the new film has focused on what Mendes will bring to the franchise, with some suggesting he will tone down - or even abandon altogether - the action sequences.

But the director denied that this was the case. He told reporters in London that the "fantastic script" had "all the elements of a classic Bond movie, including - to quell any rumours - lots of action".

When asked what fans could expect from the latest film, he added: "The movie will reveal everything, and there's lots of surprises."
Producer Barbara Broccoli said no-one had yet been chosen to write and perfom the Bond theme tune.

Financial troubles

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Bond movie, 1962's Dr No.

James Bond is one of the longest-running franchises in film history, but Bond 23 will mark the end of a four year gap.
The last 007 outing was in 2008's Quantum of Solace, directed by Marc Forster.

Work on the 23rd film was suspended in April 2010 because of uncertainty over the company's future.

The franchise had been on hold amid financial troubles, with MGM filing for bankruptcy protection last November.

A rescue deal and restructuring plan put US firm Spyglass Entertainment at the helm of MGM, which had struggled due to several box office flops and a DVD sales slump.

Craig - who made his Bond debut in Casino Royale in 2006 - is the sixth actor to play the British secret agent in the official Bond series.
Sir Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Sir Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan preceded him in the iconic role.

Casino Royale, was the most successful instalment in the franchise's 49-year history, making $594m (£385m) worldwide.

[Raiderhader]

Saw the midnight showing Thursday. I really liked the movie but, I'm not sure just how much I liked it. There are just a couple of things about it that I..... I don't know. I don't know what exactly I'm trying to say. For one, I thought the film contradicted itself in one regard -

Spoiler!

When Bond meets Q, gets the gun and transmitter and says it isn't exactly Christmas, then Q responds with his quip about exploding pens and how they don't do that any more. Then they bring the Aston Martin in with ejector seat and machine guns later on. And I have absolutely no problem with paying homage to the past but, don't say those films are obsolete first.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Raiderhader

Saw the midnight showing Thursday. I really liked the movie but, I'm not sure just how much I liked it. There are just a couple of things about it that I..... I don't know. I don't know what exactly I'm trying to say. For one, I thought the film contradicted itself in one regard -

Spoiler!

When Bond meets Q, gets the gun and transmitter and says it isn't exactly Christmas, then Q responds with his quip about exploding pens and how they don't do that any more. Then they bring the Aston Martin in with ejector seat and machine guns later on. And I have absolutely no problem with paying homage to the past but, don't say those films are obsolete first.

Spoiler!

i think you're reading too much into it. The car didn't come from this Q. It was bonds personal possession. They didn't have a lot to do with each other. Q's comments were merely to suggest that Q didn't really respect him and thought of him as merely a trigger.

The car was too reinforce that he was old school. No LoJack, classic Bond car.

[Raiderhader]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

Spoiler!

i think you're reading too much into it. The car didn't come from this Q. It was bonds personal possession. They didn't have a lot to do with each other. Q's comments were merely to suggest that Q didn't really respect him and thought of him as merely a trigger.

The car was too reinforce that he was old school. No LoJack, classic Bond car.

Spoiler!

I realize the car didn't come from the new Q. I was talking more about the tone the movie set with his comments and then later contradicted it. Maybe I did read too much into it. But it stuck out to me just the same.

[Deberg_1990]

Originally Posted by Valiant

I thought it was too long.. My only problem is big gay villains, literally, how the hell is someone scared of one.. 6.5 out of 10

Nearly every Bond movie is long. At least the ones since the mid 70s.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by mnchiefsguy

Just got home from watching Skyfall, and I was very, very impressed. Almost as good as Casino Royale, and significantly better than Quantum. Good Dialogue, lots of action, and almost not gadgetry.

Javier Bardem was fantastic as the Bond Villian.

Won't go into detail as I don't want to spoil anything, I will just say that it is well worth seeing on the big screen. Craig has really taken hold of the Bond role and is making it his own.

I haven't seen it yet, but here's an extremely interesting take on the direction the series has gone:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...ing-james-bond

Spoiler!

There is a moment in the new Skyfall when Daniel Craig's James Bond rips the tarp off an old Aston Martin DB5, gestures significantly at it, and to his companion's befuddled question — "Where are we going?" — declares: "Back in time, where we have an advantage." So I am not using any of my highly specialized film critic skills when I tell you that Skyfall is a movie about the End of Empire, in the same way that Craig's first Bond film, Casino Royale, was about How Bond Learned to Never Give His Heart to a Woman, and his second, Quantum of Solace, was about How Bond Became a Remorseless Sex and Death Machine. 2012 marks the 50th year of the Bond franchise, but plotwise, we are firmly in the origin period: We've learned more about who Bond is as a person in the last three films than we have in the 20 prior.

In Skyfall, the unmistakable signs of nostalgia, decay, and obsolescence are everywhere. Bond and Q (played here by Ben Whishaw, channeling late-'90s emo in a delightful zip-up cardigan) sit quietly in London's National Gallery and contemplate J.M.W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, which depicts, in the words of Q, "a grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap." Alfred Tennyson's "Ulysses" is quoted, at length, by an actual Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Dame Judi Dench. Both MI6 and an old Scottish manor house on a misty, King Arthurian moor are not just symbolically but literally set on fire. When Javier Bardem's superlative villain, Raoul Silva, taunts Bond as being outmoded — "Held together by your pills and your drink," he sneers — Bond responds in kind: "Don't forget my love of country."

This Bond, incidentally, is a physical and mental wreck: Skyfall begins with Bond tumbling from a train, off a bridge, and down a waterfall to his presumed death. When he returns from the grave — dramatized by first-time Bond director Sam Mendes, taking a break from plastic-bagging the American Dream in Revolutionary Road and American Beauty to shred the enduring illusions of his native country instead — Bond arrives at MI6 in time to read his own obituary. He then proceeds to fail every agent-fitness test set for him, including the shooting trial. Picture that: a Bond so impotent he can't shoot straight.

These are all heresies against the character, of course: A more typical Bond failure, in his golden years, might've had 007 pleasuring only two women when he hoped to pleasure three. But all of Daniel Craig's Bond films have gone out of their way to normalize the character, to make him human, even fallible, to hit him where we think of him as most strong (e.g., in the balls, with a knotted rope, as in Casino Royale, which makes an actual plot point of whether or not Bond's battered apparatus will ever rise again). The Craig Bonds — very much including Skyfall, and very much excluding the writer's strike-marred and partially Craig-written Quantum of Solace — have been remarkable in part because of their subtle betrayal of their own main character's basic nature, with this newest one being the ultimate betrayal. Until they go back in time,1 where Bond has an advantage, anyway.

There is something about the crazy immorality of the old Bond that I miss. Not the movies themselves, exactly. When it comes to spectacularly motivationless characters doing cruel and tasteless things, I prefer Keeping Up With the Kardashians to Octopussy. The new Bond is a psychologically complex man; he struggles with love and loss like the rest of us. When you cut him, he bleeds; even when you honey-trap him, he tries to save you from your watery death-cage. The old Bond was a psychopath, a killer, a celebration of empire but a critique of it too: He strode from place to place taking what he wanted, leaving a bloody, multihued pile of Loyal Native Companion corpses in his easy wake.

If Bond didn't have to be right, or good, then he could pretty much do anything, and the Bond series was for a long time an exercise in inventing more and more ridiculous things for him to do. Might a plot hinge on a dead circus clown clutching a Fabergé egg? Could Bond perhaps stow away on an interstellar space shuttle populated by the genetically perfect Aryan seeds of a new master race? How about blimp-fighting? In the old Bond movies, everyone was a chess virtuoso or a former carnie or an improbably skilled backgammon player. Women were named Holly Goodhead, Pussy Galore, Honey Ryder. Watching early Bond films, you are acutely aware that they were made in an era that predated the easy availability of pornography: The women are astonishingly beautiful, sadistically underdressed, and filmed in a kind of leering, POV-gonzo style that well predates the invention of actual POV-gonzo porn.

When it comes to spectacularly motivationless characters doing cruel and tasteless things, I prefer Keeping Up With the Kardashians to Octopussy. But the new Bond is a psychologically complex man.

Bond is unfailingly described as charming, charismatic, and debonair, but in an important sense he was our longest-running and most prominent villain, and more interesting for it. To take a contemporary example almost at random, think of Flight, a movie about a fascinatingly deviant character — Denzel Washington's Whip Whitaker is an addict, a liar, a degenerate — that can't help but discipline that character in the end. After proving himself to be so charismatically demonic, Whitaker is forced to repent his sins and embrace the human bonds he's scorned throughout the rest of the movie. Even the famously pessimistic Dark Knight Rises, which supposedly embodied the trend of dark and interior blockbusters of which Skyfall is a prime example, hinges on the crucial moral redemption of one character at the expense of another.

The drama of modern movies tends to be about the struggle of flawed men to be good. But James Bond wasn't good. His by-any-means-necessary code provided screenwriters and directors and actors with an infinite field of possibility. The Bond franchise was among the very few to place competence over morals, ends over means. Bond's love of country provided a way of orienting a character in the world that didn't revolve around him being inherently good or evil. And most of the time — judging by the body count, the discarded women, the wanton and enthusiastic mistreatment of native peoples the world over — he was a lot closer to evil than he was to the other thing.

I don't want to get into an Odd Future–esque argument in defense of art that doesn't subscribe to the same codes to which we as responsible humans in the world should probably subscribe. For whatever reason I prefer my fictional characters unredeemed — probably because I come from a privileged enough place that my interest in the unredeemed world is mostly vicarious, rather than bruisingly personal. And so that was always Bond's ultimate thrill for me: not the women or the cars or exquisitely tailored suits, but the easy sense of purpose coupled with a breezy amorality when it came to achieving that purpose.

The Daniel Craig Bond movies, Skyfall in particular, have been great and fascinating precisely because they have questioned and attacked that sense of purpose and the bad behavior it once permitted. For the first time, they're asking what to make of Bond the person rather than Bond the imperial fantasy. It's made for better movies (here seems as good a time as any to admit that Casino Royale is my favorite Bond, and Skyfall is not far behind it). But that doesn't keep me from mourning the fact that Bond, like the rest of our contemporary superheroes, has become so winded and anguished and boringly responsible. To see that particular wretched creature, I need only look in the mirror.

Director Sam Mendes has described his concept for Skyfall as "taking the new, tougher Bond — the realer Bond, who has much more of an inner world — and bringing back some of the things that could reconnect me to my inner 13-year-old." So there are the now-customary winking gestures at the Bond-savvy viewer — after Whishaw's Q presents Bond with nothing more than a gun and a radio, he notes the disappointment on his agent's face. "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that anymore."

But there are also intimations of the earlier, more blithely sincere era of the franchise. Bardem's Silva, for one, looks to be wearing a shaggy blond Nic Cage weave and casually propositions Bond, in the old Bill Haydon way, when they first meet. Silva has his lair on a foggy deserted island, maintains an army of henchmen there, and seems blissfully unaware of the existence of No Limit Texas Hold'em — he's a throwback, in other words, despite the fact that he's a freelancer who hacks computers for a living. In Bardem's overqualified hands, Silva is the most vivid and idiosyncratic Bond villain in decades.

There is also a komodo dragon pit, and Ralph Fiennes in suspenders, and a Straw Dogs–reminiscent finale that ranks with the best and most exquisitely shot sequences in the series. Mendes, not exactly known for his light touch, somehow finds one here. His Bond seems wryly entertained by the flaming collapse of all the moribund organizations and pieties that once sustained him — liberated, even, like a man who doesn't totally mind watching the world burn. Here's hoping that in the next one he goes full nihilist, more Joker than Batman.

Not a spoiler at all, just a long article.

Ultimately I see some truth to the review - are we at risk of making Bond just another Jason Bourne? I know these movies are more 'gritty' and 'real', but wasn't that what made Bond, Bond? Moore was too campy, agreed, as was Dalton and the later Brosnan (not the early ones, though).

I just worry that we aren't making 'Bond' movies these days as much as we are action movies with Bond as a character. The character could be named Steve and the movie would be substantially unchanged.

We have enough tortured super-assassins, do we not? It seems like we're making Bond a less and less unique character at this point.

[keg in kc]

Although this is not same world as the 60s, in any way, shape or form, this Bond felt very much to me like a modern take on Bond inspired by Dr, No/From Russia With Love/Goldfinger/On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I think it would be difficult to sit through this one and think "this is James Bourne".

[The_Doctor10]

Originally Posted by Valiant

I thought it was too long.. My only problem is big gay villains, literally, how the hell is someone scared of one.. 6.5 out of 10

Given the reactions of most of the south, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to be frightened of gay people...

I think it's pretty obvious how Javier Bardem's character is scary, but that's just me.

[durtyrute]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

I haven't seen it yet, but here's an extremely interesting take on the direction the series has gone:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...ing-james-bond

Spoiler!

There is a moment in the new Skyfall when Daniel Craig's James Bond rips the tarp off an old Aston Martin DB5, gestures significantly at it, and to his companion's befuddled question — "Where are we going?" — declares: "Back in time, where we have an advantage." So I am not using any of my highly specialized film critic skills when I tell you that Skyfall is a movie about the End of Empire, in the same way that Craig's first Bond film, Casino Royale, was about How Bond Learned to Never Give His Heart to a Woman, and his second, Quantum of Solace, was about How Bond Became a Remorseless Sex and Death Machine. 2012 marks the 50th year of the Bond franchise, but plotwise, we are firmly in the origin period: We've learned more about who Bond is as a person in the last three films than we have in the 20 prior.

In Skyfall, the unmistakable signs of nostalgia, decay, and obsolescence are everywhere. Bond and Q (played here by Ben Whishaw, channeling late-'90s emo in a delightful zip-up cardigan) sit quietly in London's National Gallery and contemplate J.M.W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, which depicts, in the words of Q, "a grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap." Alfred Tennyson's "Ulysses" is quoted, at length, by an actual Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Dame Judi Dench. Both MI6 and an old Scottish manor house on a misty, King Arthurian moor are not just symbolically but literally set on fire. When Javier Bardem's superlative villain, Raoul Silva, taunts Bond as being outmoded — "Held together by your pills and your drink," he sneers — Bond responds in kind: "Don't forget my love of country."

This Bond, incidentally, is a physical and mental wreck: Skyfall begins with Bond tumbling from a train, off a bridge, and down a waterfall to his presumed death. When he returns from the grave — dramatized by first-time Bond director Sam Mendes, taking a break from plastic-bagging the American Dream in Revolutionary Road and American Beauty to shred the enduring illusions of his native country instead — Bond arrives at MI6 in time to read his own obituary. He then proceeds to fail every agent-fitness test set for him, including the shooting trial. Picture that: a Bond so impotent he can't shoot straight.

These are all heresies against the character, of course: A more typical Bond failure, in his golden years, might've had 007 pleasuring only two women when he hoped to pleasure three. But all of Daniel Craig's Bond films have gone out of their way to normalize the character, to make him human, even fallible, to hit him where we think of him as most strong (e.g., in the balls, with a knotted rope, as in Casino Royale, which makes an actual plot point of whether or not Bond's battered apparatus will ever rise again). The Craig Bonds — very much including Skyfall, and very much excluding the writer's strike-marred and partially Craig-written Quantum of Solace — have been remarkable in part because of their subtle betrayal of their own main character's basic nature, with this newest one being the ultimate betrayal. Until they go back in time,1 where Bond has an advantage, anyway.

There is something about the crazy immorality of the old Bond that I miss. Not the movies themselves, exactly. When it comes to spectacularly motivationless characters doing cruel and tasteless things, I prefer Keeping Up With the Kardashians to Octopussy. The new Bond is a psychologically complex man; he struggles with love and loss like the rest of us. When you cut him, he bleeds; even when you honey-trap him, he tries to save you from your watery death-cage. The old Bond was a psychopath, a killer, a celebration of empire but a critique of it too: He strode from place to place taking what he wanted, leaving a bloody, multihued pile of Loyal Native Companion corpses in his easy wake.

If Bond didn't have to be right, or good, then he could pretty much do anything, and the Bond series was for a long time an exercise in inventing more and more ridiculous things for him to do. Might a plot hinge on a dead circus clown clutching a Fabergé egg? Could Bond perhaps stow away on an interstellar space shuttle populated by the genetically perfect Aryan seeds of a new master race? How about blimp-fighting? In the old Bond movies, everyone was a chess virtuoso or a former carnie or an improbably skilled backgammon player. Women were named Holly Goodhead, Pussy Galore, Honey Ryder. Watching early Bond films, you are acutely aware that they were made in an era that predated the easy availability of pornography: The women are astonishingly beautiful, sadistically underdressed, and filmed in a kind of leering, POV-gonzo style that well predates the invention of actual POV-gonzo porn.

When it comes to spectacularly motivationless characters doing cruel and tasteless things, I prefer Keeping Up With the Kardashians to Octopussy. But the new Bond is a psychologically complex man.

Bond is unfailingly described as charming, charismatic, and debonair, but in an important sense he was our longest-running and most prominent villain, and more interesting for it. To take a contemporary example almost at random, think of Flight, a movie about a fascinatingly deviant character — Denzel Washington's Whip Whitaker is an addict, a liar, a degenerate — that can't help but discipline that character in the end. After proving himself to be so charismatically demonic, Whitaker is forced to repent his sins and embrace the human bonds he's scorned throughout the rest of the movie. Even the famously pessimistic Dark Knight Rises, which supposedly embodied the trend of dark and interior blockbusters of which Skyfall is a prime example, hinges on the crucial moral redemption of one character at the expense of another.

The drama of modern movies tends to be about the struggle of flawed men to be good. But James Bond wasn't good. His by-any-means-necessary code provided screenwriters and directors and actors with an infinite field of possibility. The Bond franchise was among the very few to place competence over morals, ends over means. Bond's love of country provided a way of orienting a character in the world that didn't revolve around him being inherently good or evil. And most of the time — judging by the body count, the discarded women, the wanton and enthusiastic mistreatment of native peoples the world over — he was a lot closer to evil than he was to the other thing.

I don't want to get into an Odd Future–esque argument in defense of art that doesn't subscribe to the same codes to which we as responsible humans in the world should probably subscribe. For whatever reason I prefer my fictional characters unredeemed — probably because I come from a privileged enough place that my interest in the unredeemed world is mostly vicarious, rather than bruisingly personal. And so that was always Bond's ultimate thrill for me: not the women or the cars or exquisitely tailored suits, but the easy sense of purpose coupled with a breezy amorality when it came to achieving that purpose.

The Daniel Craig Bond movies, Skyfall in particular, have been great and fascinating precisely because they have questioned and attacked that sense of purpose and the bad behavior it once permitted. For the first time, they're asking what to make of Bond the person rather than Bond the imperial fantasy. It's made for better movies (here seems as good a time as any to admit that Casino Royale is my favorite Bond, and Skyfall is not far behind it). But that doesn't keep me from mourning the fact that Bond, like the rest of our contemporary superheroes, has become so winded and anguished and boringly responsible. To see that particular wretched creature, I need only look in the mirror.

Director Sam Mendes has described his concept for Skyfall as "taking the new, tougher Bond — the realer Bond, who has much more of an inner world — and bringing back some of the things that could reconnect me to my inner 13-year-old." So there are the now-customary winking gestures at the Bond-savvy viewer — after Whishaw's Q presents Bond with nothing more than a gun and a radio, he notes the disappointment on his agent's face. "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that anymore."

But there are also intimations of the earlier, more blithely sincere era of the franchise. Bardem's Silva, for one, looks to be wearing a shaggy blond Nic Cage weave and casually propositions Bond, in the old Bill Haydon way, when they first meet. Silva has his lair on a foggy deserted island, maintains an army of henchmen there, and seems blissfully unaware of the existence of No Limit Texas Hold'em — he's a throwback, in other words, despite the fact that he's a freelancer who hacks computers for a living. In Bardem's overqualified hands, Silva is the most vivid and idiosyncratic Bond villain in decades.

There is also a komodo dragon pit, and Ralph Fiennes in suspenders, and a Straw Dogs–reminiscent finale that ranks with the best and most exquisitely shot sequences in the series. Mendes, not exactly known for his light touch, somehow finds one here. His Bond seems wryly entertained by the flaming collapse of all the moribund organizations and pieties that once sustained him — liberated, even, like a man who doesn't totally mind watching the world burn. Here's hoping that in the next one he goes full nihilist, more Joker than Batman.

Not a spoiler at all, just a long article.

Ultimately I see some truth to the review - are we at risk of making Bond just another Jason Bourne? I know these movies are more 'gritty' and 'real', but wasn't that what made Bond, Bond? Moore was too campy, agreed, as was Dalton and the later Brosnan (not the early ones, though).

I just worry that we aren't making 'Bond' movies these days as much as we are action movies with Bond as a character. The character could be named Steve and the movie would be substantially unchanged.

We have enough tortured super-assassins, do we not? It seems like we're making Bond a less and less unique character at this point.

I said that same thing a few months back. I can't get into the new Bond movies because they have a Bourne feel to them.

[Aries Walker]

Originally Posted by durtyrute

I said that same thing a few months back. I can't get into the new Bond movies because they have a Bourne feel to them.

Yes, but Bond hasn't been a trendsetter since Connery. After that, they adapted to whatever movement was going on at the time in order to stay relevant. Blaxploitation leads to Live and Let Die; the Bruce Lee Kung Fu fad gives us The Spy Who Loved Me; Star Wars leads (directly) to Moonraker; Raiders of the Lost Ark led to Octopussy; and the resurgence of Hong Kong chopsocky led to Tomorrow Never Dies. It's how the movies stayed on top of things.

So, sure, they'll have a Bourne feel to them, but that doesn't mean they'll be Bourne clones. As stated before, I don't see any danger of confusing the two characters, or the overarching storylines.

[Mosbonian]

Originally Posted by frazod

Loved it. Absolutely loved it.

Spoiler!

Very surprised that they greased M. I guess Judi wanted to retire.

I've got this marked down as a buy when it comes out on DVD.....

[siberian khatru]

Saw it yesterday. Agree with those who say it's way better than Quantum (an admittedly low bar), not quite as good as Casino Royale.

I really like Craig's Bond.

[Deberg_1990]

Originally Posted by Aries Walker

Yes, but Bond hasn't been a trendsetter since Connery. After that, they adapted to whatever movement was going on at the time in order to stay relevant. Blaxploitation leads to Live and Let Die; the Bruce Lee Kung Fu fad gives us The Spy Who Loved Me; Star Wars leads (directly) to Moonraker; Raiders of the Lost Ark led to Octopussy; and the resurgence of Hong Kong chopsocky led to Tomorrow Never Dies. It's how the movies stayed on top of things.

So, sure, they'll have a Bourne feel to them, but that doesn't mean they'll be Bourne clones. As stated before, I don't see any danger of confusing the two characters, or the overarching storylines.

Your exactly right. Bond films have adapted to nearly every fad at different time periods.

It was Man with the Golden Gun though, that had the early 70s Kung Fu vibe.

[Aries Walker]

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

Your exactly right. Bond films have adapted to nearly every fad at different time periods.

It was Man with the Golden Gun though, that had the early 70s Kung Fu vibe.

Yep, you're right. My mistake.

[mnchiefsguy]

Great weekend for Bond in the US: including Thursday shows, a 90 million dollar weekend.

In addition, Skyfall has already earned more than 400 million overseas.

http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3565&p=.htm

[Branden Albert's Huge Balls]

Um, holy ****ing shit.

Not only is it the best Bond movie ever, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. PERIOD.

The symbolism of M as Bond's mother in this movie is just incredible.

I cried.

The ending ****ING KNOCKED IT OUT OF THE PARK. Holy **** the James Bond fanboy in me was going wild.

There was not a wasted frame in this work of art...and if the Academy does not vote it best picture I will personally kidnap all of the members and tie them up to chairs, strip them naked and re-enact the testicle torture scene from Casino Royale.

I'm going to go see this again in IMAX because holy **** it was beautiful.