There are a few pieces of James Bond iconography that almost everybody, whether you’re a fan or not, knows. His well-tailored suits. His flashy cars. His martini “shaken, not stirred.” And his super-spy pistol. That last one, oddly, has been disappeared from some of Amazon Prime Video U.K.’s James Bond promo imagery, presumably for reasons of cultural sensitivity, though the streamer has not explained the removal. (Representatives for Prime did not immediately respond to The A.V. Club‘s request for comment.)
British fans online noticed these odd changes over the weekend, which marked “James Bond Day” (October 5 is the anniversary of the release of the first-ever Bond film, Dr. No). Prime Video posters for the previous movies were doctored to remove the weapons, with some odd results. In the images, Roger Moore’s arms appear to be artificially extended past the bottom of the poster, while Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan’s hands have been tweaked to look like they were never holding guns at all. (You can see them for yourself here.)
After some backlash online, Prime Video U.K. took down the neutered images and replaced them with stills from the films. However, these stills remain gun-free. An image from Spectre, for instance, is carefully cropped to keep Daniel Craig’s piece out of the picture. Some fans have expressed nervousness about Amazon’s new complete control of Bond if the company’s streaming service would disarm 007’s classic accessory. But the gun censorship doesn’t extend very far. A compilation posted to the Bond Twitter/X page for the anniversary opens with all the different versions of the spy shooting straight at the camera. And on the official Amazon MGM Studios franchise page, the Bond banner shows almost every iteration of the character wielding his pistol—except for Craig’s, who keeps his hands tucked tastefully and unproblematically in his pockets.
