Thursday, 4 February 2016

Where does Skyfall take place in the Bond timeline?

First of all, the James Bond movies (or rather the pre-Craig movies) don't adhere to an actual realistic timeline that goes through all of the movies. Without some small exceptions (Bond's wife and her death) there aren't any major cross-movie story developments and any Bond movie can be seen as rather stand-alone, even if some small comments and allusions to previous movies are made here and there (e.g. at the scale of Brosnan making a small remark about the jet-pack from Thunderball, but nothing serious or story-relevant).



But this is slightly different for the Craig-movies. First of all they're actually a reboot. Whereas all the previous movies didn't really care that much about their respective prequels, Casino Royale was the first to actively reboot the whole franchise and introduce James Bond as a completely new character recently promoted to 00-status. This means that any previous movies, in contrast to merely being ignored, don't actually exist in the world of this rebooted franchise.



On the other hand this new rebooted franchise comes with a much tighter cross-movie development and the individual movies' stories are interweaved much more tightly (especially noticable with Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, though less with Skyfall). So while it is rather pointless to come up with an actual timeline for the pre-Craig movies, the Craig-franchise indeed has a sequential timeline with the movies happening in the order they came out and roughly at the timescales they are released. It has to be seen how far this is kept on with future Craig-movies, but since rather important story developments happened to major characters in Skyfall (especially M), I'm pretty sure the next movie will not just ignore those but rather reference them, be it only slightly.



So to answer your actual question, Skyfall likely takes place a couple of years after Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and any other Bond adventures known from other movies didn't actually happen in this rebooted universe.

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