Your Stage : I'm Writing a James Bond Movie for Fun... "007 in THUNDERBALLS!" by Mikhail P. Schalk

Hi, all, I thought I'd share a fun summer project I'm working on. I'm writing a James Bond movie. I've created a Reddit community and the script is live on Google Docs to share the process as I go. I thought it might be of interest to you scrappy folk over here to follow the process and whatnot if it floats your battleship.

https://www.reddit.com/r/THUNDERBALLS/

If you'd prefer to read the script cold, you can find the first section here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b0N3BoyH9ur-89MwNfclj9TOT2mm2cKtacKX...I've written about 20 pages so far, about midway through the opening sequence.

On the reddit I'll be sharing my full outline with spoilers and reference images, meta talk, etc. etc, but I'll just lay out the basic pitch here:

PREMISE:

SPECTRE tricks an assassin into killing the Russian president and the Russian Federation collapses, breaking up into multiple nuclear-armed states. NATO sends a taskforce in to disarm the nukes from the newly formed splinter states, and SPECTRE uses the chaos to steal 11 nuclear warheads.

They then threaten to blow up a major city every 24 hours until a certain amount of bitcoin is deposited into an anonymous account.

That will bring us up to the end of the opening sequence and the rest of the movie builds from there.

Importantly: This is not a continuation of the Daniel Craig films, but a reinvention for the next Bond actor. And I'm also straying away from the deep-character exploration of the newer films. This is a fully established Bond who doesn't really have that much of an arc in the movie, maybe only subtly like an Indiana Jones. It's really more of a SPECTRE movie, tbh.

And despite the cheeky title, it's actually going to be fairly grounded. I'm inspired by Christopher Nolan's films like Tenet, Inception, The Dark Knight. But with maybe a couple tablespoons to add a bit more pulpy popcorny fun, not a whole cup, but like 2 tablespoons more than a Nolan film. I think that'll be the right mix.

But the film is basically like 80% "heists" and action sequences. I've outlined it into 6 set piece sequences, and I'm excited to explore each interesting situation. The target is 120 pages, but the opening is running a little longer than I thought, so I may have to do some trimming in the outline somewhere or it's going to run over.

Anyway, if this is up your alley, give it a read, or say hi, leave a comment, a suggestion, let me know what you think. And no promises I finish before the new one comes out. This is strictly for pleasure...

P.S. There may be some controversial updates to James Bond as a character. It's a reinvention afterall. So don't say I didn't warn you. We're not going too far off the reservation, though. This is still a James Bond movie. ;)

Thanks for reading!