No Time To Spy: The question isn't who's the next James Bond, but do we even need another one?

No Time to Die hit theatres last weekend, and marked some significant milestones for the world’s most prolific movie franchise. This was the 25th Bond film, but more significantly, Daniel Craig’s last outing as Bond. And there is nothing more exciting to Bond fans than wild speculations about who will next step into the shoes of the character.

More than that though, it would be interesting to see what changes the character might go through. Will the new Bond inherit a world split down by right- and left-wing politics? If so, will Bond be a woke liberal or will he be a right-wing nationalist? Will he even be a ‘he’ anymore or can we expect a plethora of pronouns? More importantly, can the franchise owners really afford to alienate any one of these audiences?

Ian Fleming created James Bond as a “man’s man” who wore expensive suits, drove fast cars, shot bad guys, and was needless to say, popular with the ladies. That was 1953, a time when women everywhere stayed home to do the cooking and cleaning while men brought home the bread. It was already a man’s world, and heroes had to do something extraordinary by way of amping up these tropes. What better than a man whose job was state-sanctioned killing, whose lifestyle screamed lavishness, and one who could not be tied down by any woman? Young male boomers around the world were lapping up the books, and grew up idolising the MI6 spy, dreamt of owning Bentleys and Rolexes and sleeping with countless women. Capitalism was changing the Western world, and lines like “A gentleman’s choice of timepiece says as much about him as does his Saville Row suit” were considered immortal. It is no coincidence that Hollywood hitched itself to the bandwagon during one of the tensest times in the Cold War; the first Bond film dropped in 1962, the same year that saw the Cuban missile crisis.

Sean Connery brought all this testosterone and more to the silver screen in the 1960s, and is still considered by purists as the best Bond ever. Each and every Bond since then has brought some amount of change to the character. Roger Moore’s Bond put sophistication over the rawness that Connery brought, while Dalton’s Bond played down the promiscuity. Brosnan’s Bond reflected the technological changes that Hollywood was going through, and marked a new era for action films; even the inherent sexism in these films was now finally being addressed. But the character itself had slipped into slightly farcical territory, with quippy lines and bizarre villains. In hindsight, the Brosnan avatar was the Deadpool of the Bond universe. With the turn of the century, it was clearly time for a major overhaul, one that better reflected the times we lived in.

Daniel Craig’s 21st-century-Bond was given the most drastic makeover since the character’s inception half a century ago. Casino Royale almost felt like a reboot of the franchise if there ever was one. The rawness was back, the misogyny was not. The hero was more earthy, the villains more human. Some things though were too integral to the character to do away with, and even Craig’s Bond has had its fair share of criticism in a world that is increasingly becoming sensitised to privilege.

Some of the names doing the rounds as possible additions to the very exclusive Connery-Moore-Dalton-Brosnan-Craig Club (yup, it is a mouthful!) are Tom Hardy, Richard Madden, Cillian Murphy, and Tom Hiddleston, but that is assuming the franchise owners stick to the white male physicality of the character as envisioned by Ian Fleming over 60 years ago.

But there is so much being made about white male privilege today that it is impossible for filmmakers to not consider all alternatives when casting the lead for a film.

The Marvel universe has introduced female , African , and Asian leads, and have made a fair go of it, so why not Bond?

There have been murmurs over this past decade about broadening the scope of the character to be more inclusive, and names like Idris Elba, Dev Patel, Henry Golding, and even the famed rear-end of Regé-Jean Page have been thrown into the mix. There is also a burgeoning number of subreddits on how Lashana Lynch, who plays new 007 agent Nomi in No Time to Die, might be the perfect replacement 007, and that is new. So far, every time a new actor has stepped into the franchise, it has been to play Bond rather than a new 007. And replacing Agent 007 entirely might just be the answer the franchise owners are looking for, mainly because it allows for the creation of a character that comes without any baggage. And that is where it gets a little messy. James Bond and 007 are icons of an era long gone, written on strong pillars of white male privilege. Casting a POC or a woman in that same universe would just be an empty gesture if the universe itself remains the same, with all of its excesses. The world needs heroes but are these the heroes we need? James Bond might have no time to die but who says he cannot have a long, happy retirement. Author of Parveen Babi: A Life, Karishma Upadhyay has been writing about movies and movie stars for almost two decades. On Twitter, she goes by @karishmau.