Speaking as a fair-weather Jew: Everybody knows the Jews run Hollywood. Everybody also knows that the Jews are a bunch of avaricious opportunists, and if there was money to be made turning James Bond into a pedophile we'd do it. What, then, is the profit motive behind the lily-white casts of nearly all Hollywood movies these days? Something Hollywood doesn't want you to know is that the United States is now somewhere between 25% and 50% of their revenues. The rest of the world - primarily Asia, partly Europe - counts for the rest. And the rest of the world - primarily Asia, partly Europe - does not want to see black people. Unless it's Will Smith. No one is sure why, exactly, but Asian audiences are totally cool with Will Smith. Anybody else? fuggedaboudit. Is it racism if you can't profit off of black people, as opposed to racist because you don't like black people? I'd say yes. But no matter how colorblind the United States gets (and it doesn't look like it is, does it?), film will get whiter and whiter and whiter so long as Hollywood depends on large Asian markets to pay for its films. Effectively, a black James Bond loses half its revenue. A black James Bond effectively loses a third of its revenue if it doubles its US revenue... and Americans are more likely to watch Larry the Cable Guy as James Bond than Idris Elba. You see the worst places for black people to travel. Hollywood sees markets. Remember, Nintendo is Japanese. Yes, I'm saying America is less racist than you think because the rest of the world is MORE racist than you think, and I recognize that it's shitty. I'd totally watch Elba play Bond; I'd watch him play Thomas Jefferson. And that's the difference - there's an outside chance for blacks in American media for consumption by Americans and it's a chance worth striving for. That's how Annie ended up black: foreign markets give two shits about christmas movies and Annie is a purely American property with no international tail. But as American audiences pay less and less attention to gigantic blockbusters...
....well, let's just say Idris has less and less chance of headlining Transformers 7 or whatever.
Okay, so what I'm hearing is that Will Smith is going to be the next James Bond. What a bummer that this is the way the industry works, but what an even greater bummer that so much of the world is racist. I'd love to see him play Bond, I thought he was the most captivating actor in the Wire. Like flagamuffin, I didn't realize that Daniel Craig was done. While I'm all for Idris Elba taking up the mantel, it would seem Craig has some gas left in the tank, no? Also, people like Limbaugh seem to think James Bond is an actual historic figure and not a fictional character. They liken it to Idris playing Thomas Jefferson etc, when it's so, so, so very different. That said, Idris as Jefferson would be interesting.
Will Smith is much too expensive and much more likely to have an opinion. The Broccolis are legendarily cheap and iron-fisted. That's probably why Craig is getting the boot - now that they've built him into a movie star they have to pay him like one and treat him like one.
You see "asian." Asians see Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, etc. And believe it or not, Asian countries generally hate each other more than they hate the US. The Cantonese word for "foreigner" means both "foreign devil" and "Japanese." All others are "foreign devil, not Japanese." The Petronas Towers were finished a month ahead of schedule because the Malaysians gave one tower to a Japanese construction crew and the other to a Korean one. They then gave a 5% bonus to whoever finished first. Fights were common but both teams worked around the clock for six weeks straight to beat the other. So when a Japanese star is cast, you just lost China, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. Cast a Thai star and you lost Japan, China and Korea. Cast a Chinese star and you lost Japan and Korea, etc.
It's fucked up, but I've seen evidence of it. Race is a whole other thing in Asia. A number of our Chinese friends and colleagues do not seem to be sensitive to racism at all in the way that I am used to. The role of race in Chinese culture is nothing like ours in the US. But, that said, many many Americans, white and black, are terribly racist against Chinese. The US market wouldn't be cool with a Chinese James Bond.
Which is a crying goddamn shame because an ethnic-Chinese Briton furthering The Queen's interests in a newly-repatriated Hong Kong is about the only possible relevant spy story you can tell that directly involves MI-6 as anything other than a tertiary appendage of the CIA/NSA/DIA. For that matter, Goldfinger was originally based on the PRC's Nazi gold-laundering and counterfeiting in Macau, credited by many with getting the nascent nation through the lean times shortly after Mao took over. The more I think about it, the more awesome a Chinese James Bond would be - all the places of far-east intrigue that Bond movies have always loved are all about Chinese interests - Kazakhstan, Thailand, North Korea, Japan, Nigeria... all major spheres of Chinese influence in the past ten years. Cinematic as fuck without even trying. Maybe they can get Keith Carradine to play.