In 1953, author Ian Fleming invented the fictitious character, James Bond. Sean Connery, David Niven, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, as well as Daniel Craig have all played 007, a British secret agent who works for MI6 underneath the codename 007, in twenty-seven films. Eon Productions, which currently owns the translation rights to each of Ian Fleming’s Bond books, produced all except two of a movie.
The cinematic licenses to Fleming’s novels were obtained by producers Albert R. Broccoli as well as Harry Saltzman in 1961. They created Eon Productions, which produced Dr No, helmed by Terence Young as well as starring Sean Connery as Bond, received financial assistance from United Artists.
Following the movie’s debut in 1962, Broccoli, as well as Saltzman, formed the Danjaq operating corporation to assure future James Bond film productions. The series presently contains twenty-five movies, the much more recent of which was released in September 2021, titled No Time to Die. It’s really the fifth-highest-grossing movie series ever made, with such a total gross of approximately $7 billion. At recent prices, it really has generated almost $14 billion after factoring in inflation. Five Academy Awards have indeed been given to such movies: Goldfinger for Sound Effects, Thunderball for Visual Effects, Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers for Sound Editing, Skyfall for Original Song, and Sam Smith and Jimmy Nape for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” and Sheena Easton’s “For Your Eyes Only” are among the songs that made for such movies which have been nominated for Academy Awards for Original Song. The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award was given to Albert R. Broccoli in 1982.
The contract didn’t even include Casino Royale, which had been leased to producer Gregory Ratoff for just a television version in 1954, while Broccoli and Saltzman purchased the rights to current and future Fleming novels. Following Ratoff’s death, the rights were handed onto Charles K. Feldman, who went on to develop the 1967 Bond parody Casino Royale.
Kevin McClory, Ian Fleming, and playwright Jack Whittingham had developed a film script on which the novel was based, and a legal case insured that he, Fleming, and scriptwriter Jack Whittingham owned the film rights to the novel Thunderball. Despite the fact that Eon Productions and McClory collaborated on Thunderball, McClory kept the rights to the storey and transformed this into the 1983 film Never Say Never Again. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, which distributes Eon’s regular series, presently owns the distribution rights to both those movies.
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