Tradecraft: 007 Pieces Falling Back Into Place For Mendes, Craig, MGM?

There's a been roughly a rumor a day about the fate of the Bond franchise since MGM started falling apart financially, and I've ignored most of them because they all amount to speculation; there's been very little in the way of actual news.  And this bit falls in the same speculative category, and doesn't really give us anything new, but does assert that the old remains in place.  So in the interest of preserving the status quo, I'm passing along a tidbit from a Deadline story today in which Mike Fleming says that things are slowly falling back into place for Bond 23 (believable, given that MGM is apparently near an agreement with the directors of Spyglass Entertainment that would enable it to start making movies again, if not distributing them), and that the original players attached before the project went on hold are still attached.  In explaining why director Sam Mendes bowed out of the race to direct the hot young adult property Hunger Games (already billed as "the next Twilight"), Fleming writes, "I’m told it was because the MGM picture is clearing up and it looks like production on 007 could begin by late summer or early fall, 2011 with Mendes at the helm and Daniel Craig back in the Aston Martin."  At this point, I'm still a lot more predisposed to believe that things are exactly where they stood before, and not that Bond will be delayed for another half decade and then recast.  Then again, I did make a $5 bet at school in 1993 that despite the swirl of rumors to the contrary, Timothy Dalton would be back in the next Bond movie, so perhaps I'm overly optimistic...