At this point, it’s fairly well known that Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh once had conversations with Barbara Broccoli about potentially doing a James Bond movie and that nothing came of it. What had remained fuzzier over the years was the scale of those ideas. In a recent Playlist interview for his new art drama “The Christophers,” Soderbergh laid out the totality of how far those Bond conversations went, revealing that he pitched Broccoli two separate times in two separate eras—and that the second time, he came in with something so ambitious it would have effectively split the property in two. “
The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.”
This is almost certainly the project that Tony Gilroy revealed to The Playlist last year and one Soderbergh has mentioned in the past. The timing fits too: Soderbergh and Gilroy were already in close creative orbit then, with Soderbergh helping back “Michael Clayton” through Section Eight and supporting Gilroy’s move into directing, and Gilroy said he had been pegged to write this Bond idea after he and Soderbergh had cooked it up together.
That version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi, stripped-down, and cost-effective way of making Bond movies, but not a replacement for them. “[It would be] cheaply made, where you get people like me, who are interested in that approach to do one of these things,” Soderbergh explained. “It’s just another lane that exists totally separate from the normal Bond movies.”
Broccoli and company, he said, were at least open enough to hear it out. “They were intrigued,” Soderbergh said. “But didn’t move forward.”
Then he went back with something even bigger.
“So, when I got back into the conversation [a few years] later, then I was pitching a twofer,” he said. “Which was, ‘Yeah, I’ll do the contemporary extravaganza. But I also want to do the other one, after. Like, I want to do both.’”
That later push, Soderbergh noted, came after “Skyfall.” What that meant in practice was a two-track strategy: one large-scale, official contemporary Bond movie with Daniel Craig—effectively the slot that became 2015’s “Spectre”—and then a second film in the stripped-down period mold he had already been chasing. So, the concept wasn’t tweaking the franchise; it was a bid to expand it beyond just James Bond’s 007.
“To be fair to them, it really was a twofer,” he said. “I was like, I want to do both, I have ideas for both. But it’s all or nothing. You’ve either got to do both of them, you can’t have just one or the other, and I think that was just—that was a little aggressive.”
The story I was told years back was that Soderbergh had also loosely floated the idea of this lo-fi Bond lane as a filmmaker-driven offshoot corridor where someone like David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino might take a swing. Soderbergh confirmed as much, but admitted that it was more of a conceptual idea than anything remotely formal.
“Well, I hadn’t talked to any of those people yet,” he said. “I was just kind of, you know, pitching a hardcore auteur, low-budget period Bond.”
While the concept sounds astonishing, the notoriously controlling (and arguably risk-averse) Broccoli’s likely saw it as both appealing and problematic. Bond has always flirted with reinvention, but usually inside a tightly managed commercial frame. What Soderbergh was describing was something else entirely: one lane for the giant contemporary tentpole, another for leaner, riskier, filmmaker-led riffs with a different actor, a different universe, and a much rougher edge.
Bond is, of course, under different stewardship now. Amazon MGM Studios gained creative control of the franchise in 2025 through a joint venture with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and the company later brought in Amy Pascal and David Heyman to produce the next Bond film.
But much like his thoughts on “The Hunt For Ben Solo” idea he developed with Adam Driver for “Star Wars”—i.e., he’s no longer interested in revisiting it, even under new Disney leadership—Soderbergh isn’t attracted to dragging old Bond pitches back out just because the corporate landscape has changed. “I’m just a big believer in things—if they’re supposed to happen, they happen,” he said, stressing his disinterest and putting to bed the idea that he could re-pitch these ideas to Amazon MGM. “I’ve always followed that. It’s always worked in the sense that I’ve never regretted not revisiting something that didn’t happen many years later in the hopes that maybe now is the time.”
For him, ideas like these belong to a specific moment. “It has to happen now,” he said. “Because these are zeitgeist-y things, movies, you know? And so, it’s just impossible for me not to feel like that was the time to do it.”
Given Amazon’s reported intentions of maximizing the brand with spin-offs and other potential ideas, it’s not hard to conceive of the company broadly applying some of these ideas to the franchise. But Soderbergh is not interested in looking backward. “Now is the time to do something else.”
“The Christophers” opens in theaters on April 10 via NEON. Read our review here.
