MGM Nearly Axed James Bond for a Rival Spy Series
During a troubled period in the 1990s, legal battles and fading popularity pushed MGM to the brink of a shocking decision. The studio explored a drastic plan that could have erased the world's most famous secret agent from the big screen for good.
It’s nearly impossible to picture Hollywood without its most enduring secret agent, a figure who has been a cinematic staple since the early 1960s. The idea of 007 without MGM is just as strange, yet the studio once came dangerously close to shelving the character for good. After United Artists, the original distributor for the first dozen films, merged with MGM in the early 1980s, the new entity took over. Since then, MGM has been inextricably linked to every one of the spy's big-screen missions, from Octopussy onward. With the Broccoli family no longer in control and the company now part of MGM Amazon Studios, its stake in the franchise is bigger than ever, making it all the more surprising that executives once considered putting the iconic operative out to pasture and finding a replacement.
A Franchise on Ice
The longest delay between installments, until the recent gap following Daniel Craig’s exit in No Time to Die, occurred between the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan eras. A tangle of legal issues and fine-print contract disputes brought the entire production to a standstill. The situation dragged on for so long with no end in sight that MGM started exploring its other options. One of these involved acquiring the rights to a different collection of espionage novels and warning that if the stalemate continued, the studio would simply launch a competing saga.
The Quiller Ultimatum
“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 revealed in the book Nobody Does It Better. The studio heads were not keen on Dalton fulfilling his three-picture deal, and with no script, story, or director lined up, they began looking for alternatives.
An Agent Out of Time
Adding to the pressure was the character's dwindling cultural cachet among the key moviegoing demographic. Jeff Kleeman, a producer instrumental in the eventual relaunch with GoldenEye, noted that when Frank Mancuso took over as MGM's chairman in 1993, he commissioned a marketing study with disheartening results. “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,” he shared. Young people either had no idea who the character was or saw him as an old-fashioned hero their fathers liked. “Neither response being impressive to MGM,” he added.
Ultimately, cooler heads won out, and Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye delivered a spectacular revival for 007. The studio never followed through on its warnings, and the only full-length movie based on Elleston Trevor’s Quiller books remains the 1966 film The Quiller Memorandum, which starred George Segal.