He may have an international airport named after him, but Ian Fleming wasn’t much of a traveller. In 1959, when the Sunday Times suggested he take an all-expenses-paid, round-the-world trip and write a series of travel articles, Fleming resisted, describing himself as “the world’s worst sightseer”. He was eventually persuaded on the grounds that it could double as a research trip for his Bond novels (he was on his seventh by this stage). “Even if people can’t put up with James Bond and those fancy heroines of yours, they seem to like the exotic backgrounds,” Fleming recalled his editor telling him, in the introduction to Thrilling Cities – the book that came out of those travels. So, he continues, “armed with a sheaf of visas, a round-the-world suit with concealed money pockets, one suitcase … and a typewriter, I left London for the thrilling cities of the world – Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago and New York.” He later took a European trip visiting Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna and Monte Carlo, among other cities.  Related: Spectre review: James Bond is back, stylish, camp and sexily pro-Snowden  That list will sound familiar to 007 aficionados. They’ve all found their way on to Bond’s itinerary, and many more besides. In his 50-year service, Bond has visited nearly 50 countries, real and fictional. He clocks up a few more air miles in the forthcoming Spectre, visiting London, Austria, Rome, Morocco and Mexico. Fleming’s editor was right: those “exotic backgrounds” are as indispensable a part of the Bond formula as vodka martinis, product placement and female silhouettes wiggling suggestively over the title sequence.  For most of his movie life, Bond had the first-class departure lounges of the world pretty much to himself, but times have changed. This year we’ve already seen Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt doing dangerous foreign spy stuff in many of the same places Spectre visits. Imagine the awkwardness at passport control when Hunt and Bond realised they had used the same secret travel agent. Jason Bourne was probably hiding out in Starbucks till they had gone.  The departure gates are now rammed with Hollywood film crews, it seems. As well as Cruise’s Mission Impossible, this year so far we have already witnessed the following: a maverick gang of California car thieves taking arbitrary detours to Japan, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi (Furious 7); a Central American dinosaur park with an Indian CEO, a Chinese scientist and a French-African sidekick (Irrfan Khan, BD Wong and Omar Sy in Jurassic World); Marvel superheroes fighting it out on the streets of Johannesburg, Seoul and “eastern Europe” (Avengers: Age of Ultron); a multi-ethnic Nasa crew rescuing an astronaut with the help of the Chinese (The Martian). We’ve even had an American actor pretending to be French (The Walk). It used to be that Hollywood only left US borders as a last resort – when the location scouts failed to find a bit of Arizona that looked enough like downtown Baghdad, say – but now it’s engaging with “abroad” with an almost missionary zeal.  But pretty much everywhere movies go today, they’re following in Bond’s footsteps. Fleming’s creation was an internationalist from the outset. Bond studied oriental languages at Cambridge. He is fluent in French and German, we are told, and in the movies we’ve also heard him speak Italian (he has a few lines of it in Spectre), Spanish, Greek, Russian, Arabic, and he’s learning Danish in Tomorrow Never Dies – “You always were a cunning linguist, James,” Moneypenny coos. Bond came on to the scene just as Britain’s empire and influence was on the wane. His escapades helped to sustain the impression that Britain was still a significant global player, both in geopolitics and the movies. You could say that he is British cinema’s equivalent of Trident.  But now it is Hollywood that finds its global power on the wane. Twenty years ago, the US accounted for 70% of the global movie box office, the rest of the world the other 30%. Today it is the other way around. The international box office has grown by 33% in the past five years alone, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Territories such as Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Malaysia are booming, and eclipsing them all is China, which is on track to overtake the US as the world’s largest film market by 2019.  Traditional Hollywood wisdom used to be that to score a blockbuster you needed to appeal to the “four quadrants”: male and female, young and old. But that’s no longer enough. Now you’ve also got to factor in that your audience is primarily non-American, and might not be all that interested in, say, the finer points of California law enforcement or the mating habits of Manhattan yuppies. Failure to connect with that global audience can spell the difference between commercial success and failure. In fact, it can make successes of films that previously would have been failures. So movies that don’t travel, don’t travel. Could we call this global factor a “fifth quadrant”? It sounds like the title of a third-rate sci-fi movie, which is probably about right.  A good example of where that five-quadrant logic can get you would be the highest-grossing movie of 2014: Transformers: Age of Extinction. Part four of Michael Bay’s robot franchise was universally slated by critics for its baffling plot convolutions, special-effects overkill and general aversion to subtlety, yet it was the only release last year to make more than US$1bn. Tellingly, just 22.5% of that came from the US, the lowest proportion of any movie in last year’s top 30 according to Box Office Mojo. By contrast, Age of Extinction made more than $300m in China, a national box-office record at the time.  Age of Extinction’s appeal to Chinese viewers is obvious. The entire second half of the movie takes place in Beijing and Hong Kong. There are small roles for Chinese actors, including Li Bingbing and champion boxer Zou Shiming (who knocks out an American spook). What’s more, the bad guys are shady US corporations and CIA operatives (and Decepticons, of course). The Chinese authorities are the good guys. A naval commander even appeals to “central government” forces to protect Hong Kong from marauding robots – even as real-life Hong Kong citizens were taking to the streets to protest against China’s “central government”.  Making concessions to China is now standard procedure in five-quadrant Hollywood, whether by parachuting in Chinese cast members or snipping out elements potentially distasteful to local censors (don’t expect a remake of Kundun any time soon). Recent China-panderers include Iron Man 3 (a baddie called The Mandarin? It’s OK, he’s British), X-Men: Days of Future Past, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, World War Z, right up to The Martian.  It’s not just China. Hollywood is now hamstrung by the sum of the world’s taboos. Religious would-be blockbusters such as Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings were banned in several Muslim countries. Russia doesn’t like anything negative about its history either (it banned Tom Hardy movie Child 44, about a Soviet serial killer, earlier this year). Sexual, homosexual, horror and gross-out content are deal-breakers in many territories. As a measure of how surreal this self-censorship has become, consider how earlier this year Sony chickened out of releasing The Interview in the US for fear that North Korea would retaliate to a comedy assassination of its supreme leader with nukes as well as cyber-attacks. It’s doubtful Pyongyang really was behind the notorious Sony hack, but when you can’t even laugh at North Korea, something has really changed.  Studios have been getting more blockbuster-heavy, making fewer, more expensive movies than ever before. The risk per movie has therefore increased; as has the desire to eliminate it – which means more rigorous calculations about how a movie will “play” to all sectors. Making a blockbuster is now like manufacturing a luxury car – something that is researched and focus-grouped and marketing-strategised from every angle for every territory. That doesn’t mean you can’t make a good blockbuster of course, but stretching into the horizon is a production slate of inoffensive, apolitical, un-challenging, franchise movies: superheroes, space operas, spies, monsters, even Transformers has sequels and spin-offs planned for the next decade. Welcome to the fifth quadrant.  There are signs, however, that audiences are getting fed up with this. Tellingly, the highest-grossing movie of 2014 in the US was not Transformers (that came seventh), but Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, which focused tightly on the courage and anguish of the most prolific sharpshooter in US military history, played by Bradley Cooper. Iraqis’ suffering or the wisdom of US foreign policy were well out of the movie’s crosshairs, and it was condemned by many foreign critics as blinkered, jingoistic and borderline offensive. American Sniper was only the 13th-highest earner of 2014 worldwide. It took 65% of its $346m gross in the US. All of which suggests that there is an American audience who yearn for movies that speak directly to them, rather than globalised Hollywood product. Maybe only a grizzled old-Hollywood veteran such as Eastwood has the authority to say: “Screw the numbers, I’m making a movie for my country.”  The Bond franchise has always been careful to strike the right balance between playing to the home crowd and appealing internationally – which is why Skyfall is now the highest-grossing film of all time in the UK. Bond movies fly the flag and champion British values (or at least British merchandise) like no others – even to the extent of escorting the Queen to London’s Olympic opening ceremony. But they have always been outward-looking, too. Initially, that was towards the US. Goldfinger featured American locations and was the first Bond movie to get a proper promotional US campaign, and became the highest-grossing film of 1964. Thunderball did even better in 1966. Adjusting for inflation, both movies did far better than Skyfall, and arguably ushered in the blockbuster era a decade before Jaws.  In recent years, Bond’s focus has shifted towards Asia. John Cleese, Pierce Brosnan’s Q, let slip in 2014 that the franchise ditched its sense of humour as it never played well with Asian audiences. Skyfall also did its share of China-appeasing. Bond visited Macau and Shanghai in the movie (technically it was a sound stage in Pinewood, but hey), but in order to secure that all-important China release, it had to excise scenes showing the murder of a Chinese security guard (Chinese security guards are too good at their jobs for that to happen), and references to state torture and prostitution. Bond was originally a cold war combatant but he is more often wrapped up in personal issues these days – which conveniently take him to photogenic tourist locations rather than geopolitical hotspots. There is nothing in Spectre to upset our friends in China, the US, or even North Korea.  Like Ian Fleming, Bond is actually a terrible sightseer. In terms of Brits abroad, he is more at the Jeremy Clarkson/Prince Philip end of the spectrum. Show him a precious cultural site and he will most likely drive a car or a motorbike or a tank through it. Venetian palazzos, Egyptian ruins, Russian city centres, Turkish souks – all have perished as a result of Bond’s vandalism. The only “sights” Bond is really interested in are bars and casinos. And when it comes to engaging with the locals, he rarely goes beyond shooting foreign men and shagging foreign women. It is a similar story in Spectre. He is only at Mexico City’s spectacular Day of the Dead parade to chase down a suspect, with a few historic buildings as collateral damage (careful, Bond, it is an emerging market!). And the repair bills stack up as he continues through the Austrian Alps, Morocco and London. It is all undeniably hugely entertaining, and Bond’s cultural sensitivity has progressed considerably since Fleming’s heyday, but they are not likely to name any airports after him.  But if Bond isn’t much of an ambassador for the new, globalised moviescape, who is? On the upside, you could say Hollywood is making some amends for its Borat-like ignorance of decades past, and that respect for, or at least acknowledgement of, other cultures, nationalities and ethnicities can only be a good thing. But more often than not, there is still a white male in charge, and the rest of the world is mere exotic background. Bond blazed the trail, but his followers haven’t quite shaken off his, and Fleming’s, imperialist snobbery. There is a lot more travelling to do.  Spectre is released in the UK on 26 October.
007 has been travelling the world for decades – and wrecking much of it. Now the rest of Hollywood has learned that to conquer the global box office, you need stamps in your passport