How MGM Nearly Ditched Bond for a Rival Spy Series
MGM once toyed with the idea of shelving James Bond and launching a new spy franchise, as legal wrangles and marketing woes threatened 007’s future in the 1990s. Cooler heads prevailed, and Bond returned with GoldenEye.
It’s hard to picture the world of cinema without the sharp suits and dry wit of James Bond, but there was a time when the future of 007 was hanging by a thread. Since the early 1960s, Bond has been a fixture on the big screen, but the partnership with MGM almost came to an abrupt end. United Artists handled the first dozen films, but after merging with MGM in the early ‘80s, the studio took the reins. From then on, MGM and Bond were pretty much joined at the hip, with the studio backing every adventure from Octopussy onwards. These days, with the Broccoli family stepping back and MGM now under the Amazon banner, the studio’s stake in Bond is bigger than ever. Still, it’s wild to think they once considered giving the world’s most famous secret agent the boot.
Legal Tangles and Studio Frustrations
The longest break between Bond films, before the current gap after No Time to Die, came during the handover from Timothy Dalton to Pierce Brosnan. Legal headaches and contract disputes left Bond in limbo, and the wait dragged on with no end in sight. MGM started looking at other options, including snapping up the rights to a different set of spy novels. The idea was to show they could move on if things didn’t get sorted.
“At one point, MGM execs became irritated with the slow progress, and they optioned the Quiller spy series of novels and threatened to churn out a Quiller film series, just to prove they could,”
John Cork shared in the book Nobody Does It Better. The studio wasn’t keen for Dalton to finish his third film, and with no script or director lined up, they were weighing up alternatives.
Bond’s Struggle to Stay Relevant
Jeff Kleeman, who played a key role in bringing Bond back with GoldenEye, reckoned the franchise’s lack of appeal to younger punters wasn’t helping. When Frank Mancuso took over as MGM chairman in 1993, he ordered a marketing survey, and the results weren’t flash.
“What the marketing survey revealed that was because it had been over a decade since there had been a Bond movie that the audience cared about, the younger generation of filmgoers, the generation which studios are always seeking, was completely oblivious to Bond,”
Kleeman said. Most either didn’t know who Bond was or thought of him as someone their dad was into.
“Neither response being impressive to MGM,”
he added.
GoldenEye and the Return of 007
In the end, the threats never went anywhere, and Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye gave Bond a new lease on life. The only full-length Quiller adaptation remains The Quiller Memorandum from 1966, with George Segal in the lead. Bond, meanwhile, went on to win over a new generation of fans, proving that sometimes, patience pays off.