The Bond Movies Ranked By Box Office
 

After re-watching all the Bond movies in order over the last many weeks I found myself looking at various reviews and charts on YouTube and the internet in general to see what everyone else is thinking about these movies.

In terms of simply asking for favourites one gets a whole raft of contrary opinions and even the supposedly cricically worst of the lot garners many a fan. Upon rewatching them all I've found myself not really disliking any of them intensly enough to specifically cite any single one as the worst.

But I was still left curious as to how each movie was accepted at the box office. Could the box office provide any clues as to which are the best in terms of sheer across the board popularity? And how would that match with my own tastes?

This is actually a very hard question to answer as these kind of statistics are very hard to come by. For example, I can go to 1989 on Box Office Mojo and see that Licence to Kill ranked only no.36th of all films for that year in domestic US grosses, the worst US domestic gross for a Bond ever. However, Bond never 'flops', so this doesn't tell me how popular the movie was globally.

So I found a global set of charts on The Numbers website. But this only goes back as far as 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me. So I found out that the least financially successful Bond movie, Licence to Kill, still managed to be the no.10 grossing movie of that year globally, but I could not find out the global placing for all the movies made before 1977, just the grosses.

As an interesting note, no Bond movie has ever finished outside the top 10 movies of the year globally. In fact, 19/24 have finished in the top 5, regardless of US domestic grosses. Which must say something.

Looking at the grosses for pre-1977 Bonds, I think it's safe to say that all of them were top 5 finishers at the very least, more probably usually in the no.1 or no.2 spot, though this is only by guestimation compared to the only other available grosses for those years. Combined with the fact that in ye olden days, movies tended to run for years in the cinema with regular re-releases until TV and then video & DVD ended that need.

So what I've done is put together all of the grand total grosses for all the movies, then taken that data to a generic google inflation calculator and simply factored every gross to it's 2019 value. The results of this are as follows:

no.1 Skyfall $1.238bn
no.2 Thunderball $1.147bn
no.3 Goldfinger $1.031bn
no.4 Spectre $950.4m
no.5 Live and Let Die $933.2m
no.6 You Only Live Twice $855.6m
no.7 The Spy Who Loved Me $783.5m
no.8 Casino Royale $755m
no.9 Moonraker $741.8m
no.10 Diamonds Are Forever $733.5m
no.11 Quantum of Solace $703.6m
no.12 From Russia With Love $660.3m
no.13 Die Another Day $614.8m
no.14 Goldeneye $598.9m
no.15 On Her Majesty's Secret Service $572.2m
no.16 The World Is Not Enough $556m
no.17 For Your Eyes Only $550.2m
no.18 Tomorrow Never Dies $547.7m
no.19 Dr. No $508.8m
no.20 The Man With The Golden Gun $507m
no.21 Octopussy $482.1m
no.22 The Living Daylights $431m
no.23 A View To A Kill $363.2m
no.24 Licence To Kill $322.4m

And now for the excuses. No.24 was the only Bond movie to ever be given a harsher age rating than any of the others, detering fathers from taking their kids to see it. No.23 has a positively ancient Bond who himself thought it was silly he still had the part, so is the one with the absurdly old Bond. No.21 had to compete with a rival Bond movie playing at the exact same time, Never Say Never Again, the infamous 'Other, Non-Canon, Bond Movie'. No.19 was the first one, most people were, like, who dis? etc.

Giving us a no excuses bottom three of… wait a minute… those now left as the bottom three are all great Bond movies! As are the ones with excuses, lol. Ironically, one of my least favouries is actually Thunderball, it's so damn hard to see anything in all that underwater stuff.

As for who's the most popular Bond? Again, very difficult as:

Connery/Craig > Brosnan > Lazenby > Dalton is fairly evident, but then where does one put Moore, he both tops and bottoms the list. And let's be fair, Dalton never got his fair shot after the company got itself bogged down in legal disputes after his second movie that was itself screwed by the ratings board.

One of the only things that 'most' people agree on though is that Die Another Day is the dumbest Bond movie. Weirdest Bond movie. And possibly (?) the 'worst' Bond movie. And I gotta agree with this view somewhat, although with me it's not a set in stone position, it kinda depends on mood.

The other thing that's most agreeable almost universally is that both Goldfinger and Skyfall are examples of a Bond movie that really nails it.

My most 'controversial' personal favourites are both Moonraker and Live and Let Die. I also really liked The World is Not Enough and is my favourite Brosnan movie above even Goldeneye.

I'm a Moore fan, fav's are Live and let die, Octopussy and View to a kill.

Thunderball, Goldfinger, and Live and Let Die are my top three favourite Bond flicks. Good idea on composing this list!

For me Casino Royale was the most perfectly executed Bond movie. Which is interesting, because Martin Campbell can be a coin toss when it comes to directing, and was very different than Goldeneye. They played their cards well (pun intended) with casting Mikkelsen as an intriguing villain, signing on the controversial Craig, and getting the little details into the characters for the movie. The movies following were good, but I think fell flatter after being spoiled by CR. However, i'm very happy to hear that Rami Mallek will be the villain in Bond 25, and that Beasts of no Nation director is at the helm for this one. It should stand out.

I of course have a special place for all the Connery bond movies, as he mostly established the cookie cutout for a Bond Character. When you watch them, you don't say "this is so cliche" because every other imitation movie is the cliche to Connery's style.

And then my often unpopular opinion: I liked Dalton, and I thought A View To A Kill was a great Bond movie. Cheesiness included.

I'm disappointed Clive Owen missed the boat for grabbing a Bond role. Maybe we'll be gifted to a couple more BMW films.

I haven't watched Skyfall yet but I very much enjoyed Casino Royale (Quantum of Solace was less enjoyable) and Daniel Craig is my favourite Bond. I hated Brosnan - he just appear so meek!

Live & Let Die definitely wins the best Bond music award. Well… probably. I haven't been watching the new ones.

Awesome trivia fact about A View To A Kill: Dolph Lungren's first movie.

Thanks, Bond movies have reached that stage now where they're a goldmine for list-lovers, I could do loads if I put my mind to it. So be warned of encouraging me :D

A good documentary to watch is the one about Terence Young on one of the Dr. No DVDs explaining how most of the cookie cutout you reference was actually Connery learning everything he could about sophistication from Young and how the Bond model was based very largely on it's first director, Mr. Young. Young even had a Bond moment when his helicopter crashed into a deep river for real on the set of FRWT & had to perform a real life Bond escape from the bottom of the river, only to continue filming as if nothing had happened.

I don't think it's an unpopular opinion that Dalton was great, I don't think anyone rates him badly, he was just unlucky with his timing.

I had no idea Clive Owen was up for the part, he'll have to join a gigantic list of nearly-Bonds :D Ooop, there's me thinking of doing more lists again already…

I know what you mean about Brosnan, but it's not that bad and will depend greatly on which one you saw probably. I myself have grown to like his Bond as time has evened out the initial disconcertion. I also was a bit dubious of Craig's movies after seeing them in the cinema, but, again, with time and then watching them all in order on DVD they work much stronger together and I have a whole new appreciation for QoS and onwards.

I don't know what you class as new, even Craig's first outing was 13 years ago now :D

But, yeah, the music has been pretty great for a lot of them. I feel sure you must have at least heard Adele's Skyfall, just one of her vids of it has 360m views and it was one of those unavoidable songs for many years. Unless you have a particularly comfortable rock that is highly customisable to linger within, you lucky soul you.

But, essentially, I wouldn't know what to recommend without a date definition.

Thanks! Going to have to check that one out!

I'm a bit of a heretic on the Bond movies. I think very few of them are actually good films.

Watch them all then watch all 24 recent mainstream… trash?
Ergo, all Bond movies are good.

Any time I see Craig I think that it is Putin playing in a Bond movie.

That's because the producers weren't opposed to "Putin" Craig in a Bond movie…

I’m surprised For Your Eyes Only isn’t higher on the list. I too am a big Live and Let Die fan. It has one of the greatest lines delivered by Yaphet Kotto: “Names is for tombstones, baby! Y'all take this honky out and waste him!”

The sheer dialogue in Live and Let Die is amazing, and even more so now. It's really a great film.

A Bond movie, not my cup of tea.

Haven't watched any of the Craig movies, but out of the other ones Goldfinger is my favorite. That movie and Sean Connery is what I picture when I think of James Bond.

You should. The Craig movies are a nice refresh to the series adding quite a bit more believability and a serious tone.

I kind of grew up with bond movies being in the media mainly in the 70s and before that … So, I'm simply not used to the "more serious tone" … I would have problems of a clown suddenly trying to be an serious actor (playing Hamlet, for example), so to say.

I watched part of one of the bond movies long ago and have no interest in watching anymore.

I think that if we took a random selection of big budget movies, we'd likely get a lot of mediocrity, a couple of good ones, and a handful of dire ones. Which I'd say is about the same.

I'm not sure what you're basing this assessment on. While we can debate the merits communal average ratings, in this instance and for the point you're making, it's about the only kind of evidence available beyond your own assertations, to which you have previously stated you don't like them, which you implied was relating to all of them, which contradicts you now saying some of them are good.

IMDB ratings have the 'worst' one at 6.1, a couple at 6.3, the majority around the 6.8 mark and quite a few at 7 and above, peaking at one with an 8.

Dire movies are usually indicated by a 5.9 score or lower and genius movies are usually indicated by 8+, to which 6-8 is that standard for a good movie, in and around 7 for almost the entire series suggests a remarkably consistent mark of quality for such a long series. One might even say unprecedented until the Marvel movies appeared.

I first said that only a couple of them were actually good films - heresy in the sense that I don't regard it all as some classic collection. There is no contradiction in what I said above.

The above was a reply, as you can see, to Joxer's challenge to watch them all, followed by a selection of more modern films, by way of a comparison. I'm saying that I think that would not yield the implied results, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Oh right, I see what you mean now. It's perfectly ok to like just some of them, I don't think anyone called that guy who only likes Goldfinger a heretic. My point still stands that there's no dire ones though, and that's pretty much the point of both my post and Joxer's. Die Another Day is certainly straddling that line, but it's not unsalvageable, it just has a few crappy scenes, which are crappy mostly for bond-related reasons as oppose to general film criticism reasons.

So which ones did you like?

I liked the early Connery ones (not so much Dr. No), where the tone was kind of Cold War spy thriller, with extra gadgets. I'd rate most all the middle era as mediocre, with a couple of the Moore ones, and certainly Die Another Day, as bad films. I did think Golden Eye was pretty good, and then Craig's first outing was pretty much a winner. Skyfall was decent, the other two pretty grim.

That sounds like a fairly normal run down of the series, quite the opposite of heretical, lol. I guess the confusion is how you're applying a more strict perspective with regards to small deviations in quality when you apply your descriptors of good, mediocre and bad, in that for that entire range your basically only in the 6-8 range kind of IMDB rating.

Excluding subjectivity, the production values and production ethics of a Bond film have never changed, one benefit of the no.1 producer always being either the same person or his daughter, who's motto is "don't let them fuck it up". As a result, the set design is always great, the locations are always great, the stunts are always real (except that one scene in die another day *cough*), the special effects are preferred to be miniatures rather than CGI, casting is usually exceptional, costumes, etc etc etc, to which the end result then depends on small variations in the subjectivity of how all that is delivered as a package, hence the very close margin of ratings.

Compare that to something like the Superman series, which is all over the place, or the Predator series, or practically all other movie series apart from Marvel where the differences between good, bad and mediocre are vastly more distinct and obvious. I mean, Bond has never gone Batman and Robin or Superman 4 has it.

I'm a big Casino Royale fan. The pacing in the movie is excellent and the production values top notch. The story line is also quite believable (for a bond movie).

An impressive piece of work, lackblogger. Very interesting.

I've seen a couple of Bond movies and they were … OK. I can understand why they're so popular, but personally … they don't do anything for me. Which actually surprises me a bit, but that's how it is.

pibbur who, if he expected mr Bond to die, would (based on experience) do what was necessary immediately, and in the simplest possible way. Which of course would result in a very short movie.

Yes, Casino Royale is popular with non-pulp fiction fans. Bond is not supposed to be a realism series though, it's always, from its roots in pulp fiction, supposed to be a fantasised reality. It's more a matter of finding that fine line between too little fantasy and too much as oppose to aiming for air-tight plots based on hard reality. There are a few other entries in the series which were specifically made with more realism in mind and this quote is a meme for the production team:

"We always set out to make From Russia With Love and then end up making Thunderball".

I don't know if you'd be interested in being informed on the entries that are known for their greater sense of grounding or not, but generally, ones acceptance of fantasy in a movie is usually a good guide to the extent of critical reception rather than popular reception.

I don't think Ian Fleming's books are considered pulp fiction. I'd say he fits better in the camp with with Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle (very comparable to Doyle, in many ways). I'd agree that there is a strong element of the fantastic, or at least the far-fetched, but I don't think that puts in it the category of pulp fiction.

I agree with your comparisons, I'd say exactly the same. The ideal word to ues for this category is indeed debatable as there are so many definitions of paperback fiction:

"pulp novels, trash fiction, detective stories, adventure tales, spy fiction, etc".

The one I like is the one Bill Nighy uses to differentiate serious movies from the less serious movies, he calls stuff like Bond, Christie etc "Genre Movies".

Relevant to this discussion:

Lol, that's a good one too.

Funnily enough, QoS, aside from the silly name, which actually was a real short story by Fleming, so don't blame the production team, actually has a much tighter and less plot-holed story, even though it was made during the writer's strike, than Casino Royale, but it gets more mockery because it was the first Bond movie to require lots of knowledge of the previous movie for the plot to make sense, most which people had forgotten about when it came out.

I have no real objections to QoS, it's a fine Bond movie only slightly let down by the jump-cutty action scenes from those Bourne people.

Although they fared poorly at the box office, the two Timothy Dalton films have grown on me over the years. Certainly he made a better Bond than Roger Moore.

Most interesting and I think an element of truth for me. When I was younger I enjoyed the rest of the movies more and as I have gotten older my preference for realism and moved closer to realistic over fantasy. Unless of cause, the movie is pure fantasy/alternative reality.

Indeed, here we see a Bond movie doing Mad Max: Fury Road some 25 years before Fury Road, and one might even argue topping Fury Road 25 years before Fury Road, while simultaneously making records for explosions and also keeping the story and plot one of the least fantasised in the series.

Also: Benicio Tel Toro's first serious movie performance (his first movie appearance was in a Pee Wee Herman film, so I'm not sure that really counts…)

Pee Wee Herman films most definitely count! Those I find highly amusing, if you go into them with a Monty Python state of mind.

And here we see Bond doing Tarzan. :p

Nah, that's not him doing tarzan, that's just a throwaway joke (that likely would have got a good laugh in the theatres), though I admit, it also makes for a good throwaway joke on any forums discussing Bond ;)

As Moore said:

And that was one of the problems that caused Licence to Kill to not perform as well as the other Bond films. By taking out a lot of the more cliché but comfortably familiar Bond movieisms, and trying too hard to be book-straight, the main criticism of the movie became "What makes this different to any other action movie I could watch?" and Bond movies shouldn't be 'just another action movie'.

When it was released, Licence to Kill was competing with quite a crowd of action legends, from Die Hard to Lethal Weapon, Stallone to Schwarzenegger, et al, and at this precise moment, when Bond really needed to be something radically different from the crowd, they hired the Bond who wanted to be a purist book-bond and the production team was desperate to move away from the, at that point, clichés of the Moore era.

On top of this, 1989 was just when the outrage industry was starting to notice the boom in action films, hence the unusually harsh adult rating for Licence to Kill.

The franchise was then halted due to legal squabbles for 6 years. He was offered Goldeneye but turned it down.

Hence, poor old Dalton just got whacked with bad timing. As did the bravery to be more book-bond serious.

Even today watching Licence to Kill, it does come across as more of a generic 80s action film than a Bond film, a really good one but one nonetheless. And this is why I like Moonraker so much, and why people love Octopussy even with its Tarzan gag, because, damn, at least they stand out, at least they're unique, at least they're unparalleled *trumpets and ticker tape*. For people who like that kind of thing, of course.