Sean P. Means: A black James Bond, a female Ghostbuster and other revolutionary ideas

The name is Bond. Jane Bond.

That was the notion that popped up on Twitter earlier this week when someone posted a mockup of a movie poster for the next 007 movie, with "The X-Files" star Gillian Anderson in the lead.

The job may have a vacancy soon, as reports came out recently that Daniel Craig, the current James Bond, turned down a contract for the next Bond film. Several names have been floated, including Idris Elba, Tom Hiddleston and Jamie Bell.

Now, the odds that a Hollywood movie studio would make a major change to its billion-dollar franchise — like casting a traditionally male role with a female actor — are astronomical. Movie studios are as risk-averse a capitalist operation as one might find, and they're not going to alter a formula that has made them money for have a century without a compelling reason.

Nevertheless, the idea sparked many people's imagination, prompted an online petition and earned an approving tweet from Anderson herself.

As a thought experiment, let's consider the notion that 007, the suave and seductive spy for Her Majesty's Secret Service, could be female. How might a screenwriter pull that off?

The easiest way is one already explored in "Casino Royale," the 1967 comic adaptation of Ian Fleming's 007 novel. In that telling, after Sir James Bond (David Niven) comes out of retirement to lead MI6, he issues an order that, to confuse the enemy, every agent henceforth would be named James Bond 007 — a name affixed to characters played by Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress (who, in "Dr. No" five years earlier, was the first Bond Girl).

A similar scenario — one sometimes mentioned when Elba, who is black, is considered as a James Bond — is the "Dread Pirate Roberts" ploy, used in "The Princess Bride," where the name is a brand that comes with the job, passed on from one user to the next.

By the way, this isn't the first time someone suggested a casting choice for Bond that rankled the conventional wisdom. When Sean Connery first took the role in "Dr. No," there were critics who thought the burly Scot was too muscular and not English enough to play the sophisticated superspy.

And if you don't like Gillian Anderson as Bond, how about John Cho?

The Korean-born actor from "Star Trek" and the "Harold & Kumar" movies is the unwitting centerpiece of #StarringJohnCho. It's a website and Twitter feed started by New York digital strategist William Yu, in which Cho's face has been superimposed in posters for such films as "The Martian," "Spectre," "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation" and the upcoming romance "Me Before You."

"The goal was to spark discussion and get people to question [themselves]," Yu told The Hollywood Reporter. "If you're laughing at John Cho as James Bond, why does that seem so outrageous?"

The campaign prompted a sister effort, #StarringConstanceWu, which imagined the "Fresh Off the Boat" star as Katniss Everdeen, The Avengers' Black Widow and Emma Stone's character from "Easy A." (Mocking Stone is payback for Cameron Crowe's casting of her as a part-Chinese character in "Aloha" — an instance of Hollywood whitewashing that these Internet campaigns are criticizing.)

The "Jane Bond" discussion also comes as one of the nastier, and dumber, movie arguments is playing out, over the "Ghostbusters" reboot that opens July 15.

That argument hit its low point when a guy named James Rolfe, a YouTube movie critic who operates the website CineMassacre.com, declared he would not review the new "Ghostbusters."

Rolfe didn't say he rejects the new "Ghostbusters" sight unseen because of its female cast — with Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones donning the jumpsuits and proton packs. No, his reasoning is more about how, in his view, the new movie rejects the characters that came before in the 1984 original.

Rolfe wasn't the first to take to the Internet to complain about the new "Ghostbusters." There was the guy who, more than a year ago, recorded a video that included the line, "Now they're making 'Ghostbusters' with only women? What's going on?!" That person was Donald Trump.

It isn't hard to plumb the depths of the Internet to find a sexist streak in the anti-"Ghostbusters" complaints. It's often coupled with the "you're ruining my childhood" whining, as in Rolfe's video, that gives geek culture its unsavory reputation for head-in-the-sand petulance.

Here's the thing: Most of popular culture has been controlled by white men, the ones who have run movie studios and TV stations and record labels. As a result, much of what they have produced over the years has been for and about other white men.

But that era is changing, as demographics show. Half the world is not male, and more and more of the world is not white. And those people want to see themselves, and their stories, reflected in popular culture. If that means a black James Bond, or a female Ghostbuster, then white men are going to get used to it.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.