When James Bond passes into the public domain – which in the UK should be by 2035, seventy years after Fleming’s death – anyone will be able to make films with Bond, M, Q, Moneypenny, Leiter, shaken-not-stirred martinis and the ‘007’ licence to kill. The only two key parts of the franchise that EON productions, the film company founded by Broccoli and Saltzman in 1962, will still have sole rights to are the theme and the gun-barrel sequence – both of which were established in the first twenty seconds of the first film.
