Do Critics Ever Look Things Up Before They Speak?

From Mark Rahner's review of Casino Royale:

Remember that the "Bourne" flicks almost finished the hit job that Austin Powers had started on the perfect Cold War spy who made no sense in the 21st century.

Was James Bond really almost finished? The Bourne Identity opened a few months before the last Bond picture, Die Another Day. Did audiences shun Brosnan's finale in favor of a second look at Matt Damon?

Here's the total worldwide box office from Die Another Day: $431,971,116 (from imdb)

That's just the box office as of June, 2003. It doesn't include revenue since then from DVD sales, cable re-runs, or ancillary merchandising (particularly the EA videogames, which have all been hot sellers). Yeah, with only half a billion bucks (or more), how could EON productions possibly go on?

By the way, The Bourne Identity's worldwide take? $190,268,960. That's not bad, but it's less than half of what the Bond film drew.

I don't mean to be pedantic here, but isn't the measure of success for a popular entertainment, well, popularity? Mr. Rahner seems to be saying that because he prefers X to Y, that somehow X has completely supplanted Y in popular culture. Nice try, but no. I may dislike some things that are popular--Jessica Simpson, Tom Clancy, Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer--but it's bootless to deny that other people like them, or to claim that because something I like in the same genre manages to become popular that these agents of Satan have been obliterated. Mr. Rahner probably would have been better off saying "The Bourne Identity was fresher/more modern/more relevant than Die Another Day, and demonstrated that the Bond series was stuck in an, admittedly profitable, rut."

But he said what he said, and he was wrong. So there.