If they release it in the summer, there will be more competition for the movie. This definitely should be November.
Ordinarily, you would be right, but that is not how 2014 is shaping up. The November/December season is already pretty crowded with Chris Nolan's Interstellar, Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Nolan's TDK and TDKR both made over a billion and Inception, his last original film like Interstellar made $800 million worldwide. The Hunger Games did $700 million worldwide and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey also broke a billion. In contrast, summer 2014 is the lull between the storms of summers 2013 and 2015. With the exception of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Transformers 4, summer 2014's big tentpole movies are largely sequels to movies that performed far more modestly. eg. Captain America ($370 million worldwide), X-Men: First Class ($350 million), Rise of the Planet of the Apes ($480 million). The revived Bond series with its new billion dollar pedigree would probably fair better against those weaker summer franchises than juggernauts like Nolan, Hunger Games, and The Hobbit all within just over a month of each other.
The Final Hobbit Movie comes out in Summer 2014. November 2014 was the best release for Bond 24.
If they release the movie in 2015, why not with Mendes?
The final Hobbit movie was pushed back to Xmas 2014...
However, not sure that summer 2014 isn't already too crowded..
May - Transcendence (Sci-fi thriller w/Johnny Depp)
Amazing Spiderman 2
Godzilla
Dawn of Planet of the Apes
June- Jurrassic Park 4
Ninja Turtles
How to train Dragon 2
Transformers 4
July - X-Men - Days of Future Past
Hercules (The Rock)
Maleficent (Ang Jolie - big budget live action Sleeping Beauty)
Jupiter Ascending (new Wachowski)
Aug - Guardians of the Galaxy
That's a pretty full schedule;
Given the Hobbit isn't due out until mid/late December, I would imagine Sony would be confident of keeping Bond in the Thanksgiving time-frame;
remember it was up against the Hobbit this year and the last Twilight pic (similar audience to Hunger Games) so the only difference is the Nolan pic.
The other option would be to bring it into October but then that loses the Thanksgiving weekend which was huge for them with Skyfall..