Now that Amazon owns James Bond outright after its landmark deal with producers Barbara and Michael G. Wilson, people have been bracing for just what the streamer might have planned for the character beyond Denis Villeneuve’s new movie. Endless spinoffs for Prime Video? No… movie posters where the gun-toting spy has had his license to kill revoked by Photoshop.
Last week people began noticing that Prime Video in the UK—now one of the premiere platforms to view the Bond series digitally—had begun updating its assets for the films with new posters, each depicting the relevant Bond posed on a generic colored background with the ‘007’ logo on it, and their respective titles. Nothing too exciting, until you looked closer and realized that Amazon had digitally altered some of them to remove Bond’s gun.
Not all of the promotional imagery used in the refresh was based on production stills of an armed Bond, but multiple were, and all were digitally manipulated to remove them. As Bond fansite MI6 HQ spotted, Roger Moore’s arms were lengthened on the poster for A View to a Kill so his weapon-holding hand was erased from sight. In others, the guns were simply airbrushed out of the Bonds’ hands, leaving the awkward imagery of Bond seemingly gripping something that wasn’t there anymore, or, in the case of Pierce Brosnan on the poster for Goldeneye, looking like he’s in the middle of making a rude gesture at you.
It’s a ludicrous idea, given that Bond is a character known for his gunmanship. From the whole concept of the license to kill granted to 00 agents, to the iconic gun barrel title motifs, even to his trademark Walther PPK and P99 in later films, the fact that James Bond shoots people is not an unknown nor a controversial trait. While Bond media has tried to downplay in parts certain aspects of the character over the years (like his drinking, smoking, and general womanizing), you can’t really downplay the fact that James Bond kills people, and trying to do so even in such a silly way as photoshopping pistols out of movie posters is only going to get you endlessly mocked.
And endlessly mocked Amazon was, with some decrying that this was a sign of the future of the franchise under the company’s complete creative ownership. But it’s not the first time recently that a streamer has updated a poster to remove weaponry from sight—when Disney brought Thunderbolts to Disney+ over the summer, it advertised the Marvel movie’s arrival with a poster that edited the team’s guns (and the character of Taskmaster entirely) out of their hands, leaving them all weirdly pointing trigger fingers at each other.
We’d have to wait until whenever Denis Villeneuve’s Bond movie arrives to see if people’s worst fears about Amazon will come to light, but again, it’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that the new Bond is a pacifist: we recently heard rumors that the movie could focus on a younger Bond’s mission to earn that 00 agent status, a process which has historically required killing multiple people. Although Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment from io9 about the new posters, Variety notes that after this weekend’s celebration of Bond Day on October 5 (marking the anniversary of Dr. No‘s debut), Prime Video UK quietly updated the key art for the Bond franchise to revert them back to stills from the movies—albeit all with stills where Bond just happens to not actually be carrying a gun this time.