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THETHREEBILLIONDOLLARMAN
After 38 years and 19 films, James Bond 007 still has a licence to thrill - and make tons of money. Quentin Falk checks out the till.
It all began with Dr No in 1962. The no-nonsense British hero with a licence to kill, a larger-than-
life villain, eye-catching girls, exotic locations, hard-boiled dialogue and non-stop action. Five decades and
18 films later, cinema’s most successful franchise rolls on with The World Is Not Enough, which is edging
its way towards becoming the series’ biggest dollar-earner ever. On paper, at least. Dr No - in which Sean
Connery first uttered his famous introduction, “Bond, James Bond” - was budgeted at just under one million dollars and grossed nearly $60 million worldwide. With Pierce Brosnan on his third assignment in the role, TWINE - as it was codenamed during production - officially cost $100m (though $120m may be actually closer to the mark). It has to date racked up around $300m... and that’s even before its release in territories like Japan and Taiwan. In total the series has globally grossed some three billion dollars. Bond’s previous biggest moneymaker was Goldeneye with a global gross of $345m. The megadollar success of Goldeneye in 1995/96 was all the more remarkable because it had been a considerable - if calculated - gamble to revive 007 after a six-year hiatus following Timothy Dalton’s only patchily effec-
tive two-film Bond stint at the back end of the Eighties. According to Ken Green, distributor UIP’s director of mar- keting who has handled no fewer than seven Bond films, it was then “make or break” for the series: “There was a huge chunk of our target audience that had never seen a Bond film in the cinema. Licence To Kill in 1989 had been a ‘15’ and so that audience were 21-year-olds by the time we opened Goldeneye. The rating had undoubtedly hurt business. Our first priority was to target the youth market and make them aware that Bond wasn’t just something Dads would enjoy; rather something they could identify with too. We were naturally very pleased to get a ‘12’ which has continued ever since.” Of course, between Licence To Kill and Goldeneye, the world had also changed. The Berlin Wall had come down, old cinematic enemies were now allies and a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” like Bond (as so memorably described by Judi Dench’s new look M) could have proved fatally jurassic. Said Green: “The sto- ries had to reflect a new world, had to be relevant. Why would a secret agent be battling on Out There? So the series had to change to reflect the Nineties and, of course, the new millennium.
Perhaps Brosnan was a gamble - yet you feel that he was somehow always destined to play the part. He signed up for three Bonds and had a contractual option to do a fourth, which I understand he’s taken up.” Although shooting costs undoubtedly hit a new series’ high on TWINE, Green said that the same UK advertising-publicity budget (an unconfirmed £2m) as Tomorrow Never Dies was maintained: “With Bond, it’s a publicity machine of its own. The press is always hungry for Bond stories. It’s not so much trying to generate more but controlling them and maintaining the quality.” The operative word is franchise with everyonefromshoeandeyewearmanufacturerstobatteriesandbrewersfightingforashareofthepromotionalaction. Sadly, Green, who saw his first Bond film when he was 20 and is “still a fan” to this day, has served his own last tour of 007 duty. Bond’s Hollywood master is MGM who’s about to pull out of the UIP set-up. Metro’s new distribution link-up will be via Fox,
which means future Bond big-screen business will simply add more to the Murdoch mil- lions. By the time Brosnan’s back on assignment, he’ll be pushing 50 and seems likely to handoverhisWaltherPPKandthekeystothelatestBMWafteronemoremission. He’ll
be a hard act to follow bearing in mind just the UK box-office generated by his three 007 outings: Goldeneye ended up at around £18m, Tomorrow Never Dies hit £19.8m and, after just seven weeks, TWINE was £26.5m and still climbing. Commented Green: “It is by far the most suc- cessful Bond here and is still doing really solid business. I’d love it to do £30m.” Now that would be both shaken and stirred. ■
Photos opposite page and top: Pierce Brosnan as the latest 007 in The World Is Not Enough; Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever; Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough; Roger Moore and Lois Maxwell in For Your Eyes Only ALL PHOTOS © DANJACQ
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