Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos posed a question to his X followers: "Who'd you pick as the next Bond?" Just one day prior, that inquiry may have felt a bit presumptuous: while Amazon's $8.

For over six decades, the Broccoli family has been as much a part of the James Bond film franchise as vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred, of course), beautiful women and henchmen with terrible aim.

Amazon’s surprise deal to wrest control of 007 from the Broccoli family marks the latest front in a decades-old war to lock up the last remaining billion-dollar franchises.