There isn’t another franchise in Hollywood like James Bond, which has endured for nearly 60 years and 25 installments, regularly recasting its leading man and reinventing itself from the ground up to keep moving with the times and remain relevant. Daniel Craig has bowed out with the release of No Time to Die, but by this time next year 007’s latest reboot will be well into early development.
Not many direct comparisons can be made between cinema’s most famous secret agent and The Simpsons, other than their respective longevity, but No Time to Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga posits that they’ve both shown a habit for predicting real-world events ahead of time.
“The Simpsons Did It” is one of the most popular memes out there, with the beloved animated series having eerily or coincidentally made a huge number of bold calls that turned out to be true or proven correct years or even decades down the line, which is where Fukunaga sees the similarities as he revealed during a Q&A with The AV Club.
“It’s funny, if you go back and look at some of the the villains and their plots to see how they’ve played out differently over time, it’s almost like The Simpsons, when The Simpsons predicts things in the future. I feel like you can go back into some of the Bond films and kind of pinpoint things that we ended up seeing actually happening.”
In the cutthroat world of entertainment you need to either adapt or die, and having done its best to stay at least one step ahead of the curve for so long, James Bond has even managed to predict the technological or sociopolitical future more than once, just like Springfield’s most famous residents.