A set of James Bond posters has been quietly dropped by franchise owner Amazon after an outcry from 007 fans questioning the future of the franchise.

A bizarre set of “gunless” James Bond posters appeared on the Prime Video streaming platform late last week, almost immediately prompting accusations that Amazon was trying to sanitise the brand.

Amazon MGM studios bought the production rights to the more than six-decade old movie franchise for more than US$1 billion ($A1.5 billion) in February.

The set of digital poster artwork was released to coincide with James Bond day on Sunday and for use as thumbnail imagery on Amazon’s own and other platforms.

Oddly, the guns appeared to have been removed from already well-known images, including a portrait of Sean Connery cradling a Walther PPK pistol taken as a publicity shot for Dr No.

A famous teaser poster for the Daniel Craig film Spectre was edited to crop out the gun he is holding by his side, a publicity image of Roger Moore in Live and Let Die was similarly edited to remove his .44 Magnum, while Pierce Brosnan was disarmed in a poster from Goldeneye.

US author Scott McCrea described the posters as “nothing less than cultural vandalism” in a post on X, while others argued that it wasn’t a good sign for the future direction of the Bond franchise.

“They photoshopped all the guns out of the James Bond movie thumbnails,” posted fantasy author John A Douglas. “Just in case you still had hope for Amazon being in charge of the franchise.”

The controversial images have since been replaced by Amazon with movie stills – however, the images chosen are still Bond without his gun.

While the next actor to portray agent 007 is yet to be decided, the next instalment of Bond will be directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.

The appointment of Villeneuve in June went a long way toward reassuring anxious Bond fans, thanks to the pedigree of the four-time Academy Award nominee’s existing films. They include the Dune franchise, as well as with Prisoners, Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival.

Villeneuve will also be executive producer of the upcoming Bond movie, alongside his wife Tanya Lapointe.

It marks the latest step in a major overhaul of the Bond franchise, following Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson handing over creative control to Amazon MGM Studios as part of a lucrative deal.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Broccoli family, long the force behind the Bond films, agreed to co-own the intellectual property and granted Amazon the ability to move forward without their creative approval.

Speculation about who will replace Daniel Craig as James Bond is rife, with Henry Cavill, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Jonathan Bailey and even Australia’s Jacob Elordi among the actors regularly mentioned as being in the running.