Updated: EON Productions officially deny the “Carte Blanche” title rumors. Their statement: “The new film is not going to be called Carte Blanche and will have nothing to do with the Jeffery Deaver book.”
Granted, this is pulling a few disparate pieces together and making them stick and it could all amount to a big coincidence or red herring of sorts, but the guys over at Bleeding Cool have put together a compelling case nonetheless that the still-untitled “James Bond 23” may in fact be named “Carte Blache.” So, let’s go through the evidence shall we?
Exhibit A: Serbian paper Blic recently revealed that homegrown cellist Jelena Mihailovic will write the opening score to the forthcoming “James Bond 23.” How did she get the gig? According to paper, she performed at Cannes in May and blew away the producers and director Sam Mendes who immediately gave her “a chance to write the opening score for the new James Bond film, entitled Carte Blanche.’” Wait. Maybe that’s just a bad translation. Maybe they meant she would have carte blanche to come up with the music for the movie. Maybe…but let’s go to the next clue shall we?
Exhibit B: Author Jeffrey Deaver has penned the 37th Bond book which just hit shelves in June and it’s called, you guessed it, “Carte Blanche.” But wait, there’s even more. In the midst of the extensive plot summary on Wikipedia is this juicy bit: “[Bond] starts his assignment on the outskirts of Novi Sad in Serbia where an Irish sapper-turned-enforcer named Niall Dunne is planning to derail a train carrying three hundred kilograms of methyl isocyanate, dumping it into the Danube. Bond is able to prevent the catastrophe by derailing the train himself at a much safer place along the line. He is unable to detain Dunne, who kills Bond’s Serbian contacts in the course of his escape.”
Exhibit C: Just last week, reports surfaced out of the India — one of the proposed shooting locations (though that may change to South Africa) — that filmmakers were looking to film a massive train sequence. So do all of these dots connect?
Maybe. Certainly, the James Bond franchise isn’t shy of terrible names for their movies (seriously, “Quantum Of Solace” is awful — we still don’t know what that means) and this all seems to make a pretty good case for “Carte Blanche” (not exactly the greatest title, though we suppose there is some kind of French elegance to it). We probably won’t know for sure until the tightlipped producers decide to spill the beans when they’re good and ready, but with filming set to begin this fall, official news should arrive soon, and in a torrent.
Of course, if this is true, we reckon Deaver was likely working in tandem with screenwriter Patrick Marber (”Closer,” “Notes on a Scandal”) as the script and story was being developed. So far, Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris and Judi Dench are set to star in the in the film that will hit theaters on November 9th, 2012.
