lackblogger
SasqWatch
- Joined
- November 1, 2014
- Messages
- 4,778
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.
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.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2014
- Messages
- 4,778
