Never Say Never Again -james Bond 007- __top__ -
The answer, fascinatingly, is all of the above. Here is the complete story of the rogue James Bond film—the one they said would never happen. The very name Never Say Never Again is a piece of cinematic lore. In 1971, after completing Diamonds Are Forever , Sean Connery famously declared he was finished with the role of James Bond. "Never again," he told the press. The franchise moved on, introducing Roger Moore in Live and Let Die .
It is dated, bizarre, and utterly delightful. Connery’s deadpan seriousness against Atkinson’s physical comedy creates a scene that feels less like Bond and more like a Monty Python sketch. Never Say Never Again opened on October 7, 1983, to mixed reviews but strong box office, grossing $160 million worldwide (equivalent to over $450 million today). Octopussy , released in June 1983, earned $187 million. In the Battle of the Bonds, Roger Moore won by a narrow margin, but Connery proved the demand for a mature, alternative 007 was very real. Never Say Never Again -James Bond 007-
Critics were split. Roger Ebert praised it as “a superior Bond film, less reliant on gimmicks.” Others, like Variety , called it “a rich man’s television movie.” Today, the film holds a 70% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—respectable, but not classic. For years, Never Say Never Again was a footnote. Eon Productions ignored it. Home video releases were sporadic. But in the 2010s, a strange reappraisal began. With Daniel Craig’s gritty, aging Bond in Skyfall and No Time to Die , audiences saw the blueprint Connery had laid down in 1983. The answer, fascinatingly, is all of the above
Thus, Never Say Never Again became a real-life headline masquerading as a movie. To understand why this film exists, one must travel back to the early 1960s. Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels, collaborated with screenwriter Kevin McClory and director Jack Whittingham on an early screenplay treatment that would eventually become Thunderball . After a messy legal dispute, a 1963 court ruling granted McClory certain film rights to the Thunderball story. In 1971, after completing Diamonds Are Forever ,
The official Eon Productions made Thunderball in 1965 with Connery. But the settlement stipulated that McClory could remake the film after a certain number of years. In 1975, McClory announced plans for a new Bond film, leading to a decade of litigation. By 1982, with Eon’s Octopussy already in production, McClory partnered with Warner Bros. and producer Jack Schwartzman to launch Never Say Never Again directly against the official Bond series.
Connery plays Bond as a man who knows he has been left in the cold. His 007 is cynical, hungover from decades of service, and openly contemptuous of M and Q (who are played with delightful spite by Edward Fox and Alec McCowen). The famous training montage—Bond grappling with a younger agent named "Fellowes"—is a not-so-subtle dig at the Roger Moore era. Bond wins not through raw athleticism but through dirty tactics and cunning.
In the pantheon of James Bond films, one title stands apart—not just for its plot, but for the legal war behind it, the star who refused to die, and the peculiar fact that it exists outside the official Eon Productions canon. That film is Never Say Never Again (1983).
