If the success of Skyfall (UK/USA: Sam Mendes, 2012) celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the James Bond series and revitalized it for another halfcentury, this longevity could be viewed on two axes. First, synchronically, its brand power has already become “too big to fail” despite the ups and downs of individual entries in the series. Audiences know and repeatedly enjoy what they can expect from this longest film franchise. The Bondian narrative follows the flowchart of “moves” with archetypal characters: M's assignment of a mission to Bond, the Villain's threat, Bond's reactions, the Woman's seduction, the Villain's capture and torture of Bond, Bond's escape and victory, and his convalescence with the Woman. Along this syntactic line, the semantic Manichean oppositions between characters, ideologies, and values are arranged in a quasi-mythical, structuralist fashion, with sexist, imperialist, and phallic codes crossing hermeneutically (Eco 1966, 37-39). Second, diachronically, the Bond series has never ceased evolving through the Cold War against the larger backdrop of the British Empire's decline and its global Anglo-American remodeling. As a “militainment” that meets societal expectations about war, media, and popular culture (Stahl 2009), it has flexibly adapted to the ages of the nuclear crisis, the Iraq War, 9/11, communist and post-communist militancy. Moreover, the agent with the “license to kill” has incarnated a modern fantasy of sovereign masculinity, stylish and high living as well as fast shooting and sexually liberated, while having been played by six actors.