It’s going to be about 4 and half years between the release of Spectre and the newest one. That’ll be the biggest gap since the change-over from Dalton to Brosnan. It’s hard to believe in retrospect but, arguably, the best films--the early Connery ones--only had about one-year between their release dates.
Yeah, it’s too bad Monica Bellucci didn’t have a more substantial role in Spectre. Apparently she was going to be in Tomorrow Never Dies, but sadly the producers went with Teri Hatcher instead.
Lea Seydoux is a middling Bond girl for me. I thought she was good in the train sequence and in the sleepy/drunken scene in the hotel room of Spectre, but otherwise the film mostly wasted her. I think Craig and the producers probably recognized that, which may explain why they’ve brought in Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator/writer of Killing Eve to help script the new one. The director, Cary Fukunaga (True Detective, season 1), has also hinted at a more substantial role for Seydoux.
But there have been many worse Bond girls in the history of the franchise. Numero Uno among the offenders is the completely vacuous Tanya (“Ohh, James”) Roberts in A View to a Kill; but Denise Richards as a supposed nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough is pretty bad, too.
I had never heard that before about Moore being such a “cheap bastard.” He was widely regarded as one of the nicest Bonds off-screen, not least for his work with Unicef. Moore was my Bond growing up, but never my favourite—just too effete, lightly-comedic and one-dimensional to my taste, though I still enjoy revisiting his films, however cringe-worthy at times.