Ranking All 24 James Bond Movies

Box Office: $70.3 million domestic/$210.3 million worldwide*

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Theme Song Performed By: Shirley Bassey

Fun Fact: The opening aerial sequence required 88 skydives.

Plot: Longtime Bond producer Albert R. ”Cubby” Broccoli’s cash-in on the late-’70s resurgence of sci-fi spliced the narrative DNA of 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me with a space battle straight out of Star Wars. With the help of CIA agent/astronaut Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles), 007 crosses laser pistols with billionaire Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), who seeks to destroy all life on earth save for a genetically perfect few. Drax intends to start a new master race that doesn’t even include his own iron-dentured henchman Jaws (Richard Kiel, reprising his role from The Spy Who Loved Me). So guess who becomes Bond’s ally? Played for broad comedy and featuring bizarre pop culture references (the Magnificent Seven theme plays when Roger Moore dresses like a gaucho), Moonraker finds the franchise parodying itself. C-

Box Office Grosses: The-Numbers.com

Box Office: $160.9 million/$431.9 million

Director: Lee Tamahori

Theme Song Performed By: Madonna

Fun Fact: Madge is the only theme-song performer to have a cameo in a Bond film — she plays a fencing instructor.

Plot: Pierce Brosnan’s fourth and final film as 007 pushes plausibility to its breaking point and gives us the showstopping sight of Halle Berry in an orange bikini. After being tortured in a North Korean prison, Bond is released and goes off-mission to Cuba, trying to find out who betrayed him and win back his rescinded license to kill. Berry adds some feisty spice, but the villain (Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves) is a bit forgettable and the invisible car chase at his Icelandic Ice Palace is double-0 hooey. C+

Box Office: $169.4 million/$591.7 million

Director: Marc Forster

Theme Song Performed By: Jack White and Alicia Keys (”Another Way to Die”)

Fun Fact: In a Goldfinger homage, Bond discovers the oil-coated corpse of Arterton’s Strawberry Fields sprawled on a bed.

Plot: Picking up right where 2006’s Casino Royale ended, Quantum is a true sequel that kicks off with a high-speed Aston Martin car chase, an MI6 double cross that almost gets Judi Dench’s M snuffed, and a Bourne-esque foot chase across the red-tile roofs of Siena. From there, things get complicated fast. Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) is a seemingly squeaky-clean eco-entrepreneur who’s wrapped up in an organization called Quantum that echoes early-Bond’s shadowy criminal cabal SPECTRE (a.k.a. the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion). There’s an opera-house shootout in Austria, a cool drowning-in-crude-oil death in Bolivia, and two easy-on-the-eyes Bond girls (Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton) for the price of one. Still, it’s no Casino Royale. B-

Box Office: $126.9 million/$361.7 million

Director: Michael Apted

Theme Song Performed By: Garbage

Fun Fact: The title is the English translation of the Bond family motto: Orbis non sufficit.

Plot: A mix of the sublime and the downright silly, Brosnan’s third outing becomes less an action film than a character study about post-traumatic stress disorder, oil politics, and the nature of evil. World introduces the franchise’s first true female supervillain, Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King, a teenage kidnapping victim-turned-terrorist who may still be suffering from Stockholm syndrome as an adult. Considering that MI6 helped make King a villain by failing to rescue her from her captor (Robert Carlyle’s bald, pain-immune Renard), Bond’s final confrontation with her is complex and almost bittersweet. Unfortunately, whenever Denise Richards appears as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones — she recites her lines as if she learned them phonetically — the movie pretty much melts down. B-

Box Office: $43.1 million/$111.6 million

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Theme Song Performed By: Nancy Sinatra

Fun Fact: Built at Pinewood Studios outside London, the set for the iconic volcano lair stood 148 feet tall and included an operating helipad and monorail.

Plot: Roald Dahl, creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, adapted what he felt was pal Ian Fleming’s ”worst” 007 book. He ditched most of the original plot and sent Bond nearly to the final frontier — and the outer limits of plausibility. To thwart SPECTRE from hijacking space capsules, Sean Connery’s undercover, presumed-dead Bond ”becomes” Japanese, a process that amounts to little more than shaving his chest hair. With help from two of Tokyo’s sexiest secret agents (Akiko Wakabayashi’s Aki and Mie Hama’s Kissy Suzuki), he finally meets Nehru-jacketed, white-kitten-stroking Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). But the evil mastermind is not the only one to say ”Goodbye, Mr. Bond.” Connery also left the series (temporarily) after this stylish, if parody-ripe, entry. B-

Box Office: $51.2 million/$191.2 million

Director: John Glen

Theme Song Performed By: a-ha

Fun Fact: A 24-year-old Timothy Dalton was supposed to replace Connery in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but was nixed because he was deemed too young. Brosnan was going to take over for Roger Moore in The Living Daylights, but Dalton got the job when NBC exercised a last-minute option for one final season of Remington Steele.

Plot: Reagan-era Bond fans weaned on Moore’s effervescent charm cried, ”Bland! James Bland!” over Dalton’s brooding portrayal of the character. But Dalton’s approach perfectly suited the topical, Iran-contra-influenced story about a dizzying diamonds-for-drugs-for-arms plot involving a beautiful cellist (Maryam d’Abo) duped into aiding a diabolical Soviet general (Jeroen Krabbé). The film’s politics now seem radically dated — Bond rides with the mujahideen in Afghanistan! — but its darker tone was well ahead of its time. B-

Box Office: TBD

Director: Sam Mendes

Theme Song Performed By: Sam Smith

Fun Fact: With its many nods to previous 007 outings, adversaries, and gadgets (an Aston Martin fitted with an ejector seat), it’s no surprise that the name of Lea Seydoux’s character, Dr. Madeleine Swann, is a double reference to Remembrance of Things Past author Marcel Proust. 

Plot: With MI6’s future in doubt (again), Bond goes rogue (again). Acting on a scrap of beyond-the-grave intel from the late M (Judi Dench), 007 hopscotches the globe working his way up the ladder of a shadowy criminal organization called Spectre – the many-tentacled employer of his most nefarious past foes – headed by a bonkers baddie in a Dr. No Nehru jacket named Franz Overhauser (Christoph Waltz). The film wants to be the unifying culmination of all of Daniel Craig’s license-to-kill missions, but it squaders the Big Payoff it sets up. B-

Box Office: $43.8 million/$116 million
Director: Guy Hamilton
Theme Song Performed By: Shirley Bassey
Fun Fact: After George Lazenby passed on re-upping as Bond, the producers signed John Gavin, but the studio lured Connery back for a then-record salary of $1.25 million.
Plot: Connery fans breathed a sigh of relief as the suave Scot reluctantly returned. And not a moment too soon. After all, there’s the little matter of payback for the murder of 007’s wife. In addition, SPECTRE’s out to get its nefarious mitts on South African diamonds while blackmailing the world with a laser-armed satellite. Jill St. John got male moviegoers hot and bothered as the sassy, sex-kitten smuggler Tiffany Case, but we prefer Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole. With its byzantine oil-rig battle, absurd moon-buggy chase, and homoerotic henchmen Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), Diamonds has its tongue a bit too far in its cheek, but Connery diehards were too busy cheering for their hero to nitpick. B

Box Office: $21 million/$97.6 million
Director: Guy Hamilton
Theme Song Performed By: Lulu
Fun Fact: Bond girl Maud Adams would later go on to star in 1983’s Octopussy as well.
Plot: Bond receives an unexpected gift in the mail: a gold bullet with 007 engraved on it. He seems to be the next target on the hit list of Christopher Lee’s dastardly Scaramanga. Lee adds a touch of class (and a superfluous third nipple) to the colorful menagerie of big-screen Bond villains with his solar death ray. And after a silly kung fu detour, Bond faces off against his foe — as well as Scaramanga’s pint-size sidekick, Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) — at a mod island hideout in the South China Sea. Adams and Britt Ekland don’t add much besides eye candy, but the climactic shoot-out in Scaramanga’s hall-of-mirrors fun house is a thrilling homage to Orson Welles’ 1948 film The Lady From Shanghai. B

Box Office: $125.3 million/$339.5 million
Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Theme Song Performed By: Sheryl Crow
Fun Fact: Twelve years before creating Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes played Britain’s minister of defense.
Plot: A power-drunk, Murdoch-like media baron named Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) seeks to ignite World War III for no reason other than to boost TV ratings and newspaper sales. Bond intervenes to maintain peace, avenge his murdered old flame Paris (Teri Hatcher), woo Chinese agent Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), and restore journalistic integrity. On at least three out of four counts, mission accomplished. B

Box Office: $35.4 million/$161.8 million
Director: Guy Hamilton
Theme Song Performed By: Paul McCartney and Wings
Fun Fact: Moore’s love scene with African-American actress Gloria Hendry was cut from the film when it was shown in South Africa.
Plot: The Roger Moore era begins with a blaxploitation bang. The debonair heir to the 007 mantle tones down Connery’s brutality and cocks an amused eyebrow at the international-man-of-mystery proceedings — usually accompanied by a saucy double entendre. When Yaphet Kotto’s Dr. Kananga (a.k.a. Mr. Big) hatches a plan to corner the world heroin market, Bond heads to Harlem (where he looks mighty uncomfortable) before jetting down to the fictional Caribbean island of San Monique, home of voodoo rituals and a metal-clawed killer. Jane Seymour is lovely and tragic as the tarot-reading Solitaire. And Kananga’s demise (he explodes after being force-fed a shark-gun bullet) is one for the ages. B

Box Office: $16.1 million/$59.6 million
Director: Terence Young
Theme Song Performed By: John Barry & Orchestra
Fun Fact: After watching the film, Bond creator Ian Fleming reportedly called it ”Dreadful. Simply dreadful.”
Plot: This is where it all begins, and where the formula for the 50-year spy saga is laid out: the shot-through-a-gun-barrel opening, composer Monty Norman’s slinky 007 theme music, etc. Connery handles his introduction with the high-thread-count smoothness we’ve come to expect (”Bond…James Bond”) at a London casino, where he’s lucky with the cards and the ladies. Meanwhile, the Chinese überbaddie of the title (Joseph Wiseman) is out to foil an American space launch with a radio beam. Dr. No isn’t the best Bond film, but it’s a pistol of a debut, as the man with the license to kill heads to Jamaica, eludes a tarantula in his bed, and stumbles upon a beachcombing beauty (Ursula Andress’ Honey Ryder) on his way to saving the world. B

Box Office: $50.3 million/$152.6 million
Director: John Glen
Theme Song Performed By: Duran Duran (it was the only Bond theme to top the Billboard Hot 100)
Fun Fact: Dolph Lundgren, who was then dating star Grace Jones, made his film debut as a bodyguard of Russian general Gogol (Walter Gotell).
Plot: Roger Moore was 56 in his seventh and last outing. It shows. In real life, he was even older than the mother of his costar Tanya Roberts. Still, he kicks butt. Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin, the freak offspring of a Nazi eugenics experiment, rigs horse races, attempts the destruction of Silicon Valley with his Amazonian henchwoman May Day (Jones), and holds Roberts’ breathy geologist hostage aboard a blimp, building to a sky-high climax atop the Golden Gate Bridge. Over the top? Sure. Entertaining? No question. B+

Box Office: $34.7 million/$156.2 million
Director: John Glen
Theme Song Performed By: Gladys Knight
Fun Fact: Because of a change to the tax code that made U.K. production prohibitively expensive, this was the first Bond film with no scenes shot in Britain.
Plot: This time it’s personal. 007 goes rogue to investigate the sadistic banana-republic drug lord (Robert Davi) who fed his CIA pal Felix Leiter (David Hedison) to a shark. In this brutally violent revenge thriller, deaths are inflicted by fire, industrial shredder, pressure chamber, and electric eel. But it’s Dalton’s Bond who inspires true dread when he goes undercover as a thug for hire. Assisted by scrappy, sexy CIA agent Pam Bouvier (future Law & Order prosecutor Carey Lowell), he pits a gallery of magnificent rogues against one another, including a sleazy boat captain (Anthony Zerbe), a psychotic hitman (Benicio del Toro), and a crooked televangelist (Wayne Newton). B+

Box Office: $67.9 million/$187.5 million
Director: John Glen
Theme Song Performed By: Rita Coolidge (”All Time High”)
Fun Fact: Before Moore re-upped at the last minute, James Brolin screen-tested for the role.
Plot: One of the most woefully underappreciated Bond films, Octopussy was released four months before Connery’s unofficial 007 flick Never Say Never Again (a non-Broccoli-produced remake of Thunderball). Octopussy is a classic cloak-and-dagger nail-biter about a scheme by a rogue Russian general (Steven Berkoff) to detonate a nuke on an American military base in Germany. Along the way, Bond faces plenty of diversions: an assassin with a yo-yo buzz saw, Louis Jourdan’s backgammon-cheating heavy Kamal Khan, Adams returning from The Man With the Golden Gun as the thinking man’s Bond girl with a squad of female acrobat warriors in skintight red spandex catsuits, and a nifty switcheroo with a Fabergé egg. B+

Box Office: $54.8 million/$195.3 million
Director: John Glen
Theme Song Performed By: Sheena Easton
Fun Fact: Early in the film’s shoot, Bond conquest Cassandra Harris married future 007 Pierce Brosnan.
Plot: Following the silly space schlock of Moonraker, Bond gets back to basics. After a British spy ship carrying a top secret transmitter is sunk off the Albanian coast, 007 races to salvage the wreck before the Russians do. But when a marine archaeologist working for MI6 is gunned down, his daughter (Carole Bouquet, deadly with a crossbow) is out for payback with Bond’s help. Bond beds an ill-fated countess (Harris), gets chased by Aryans on motorcycles down the Italian Alps, and storms a vertiginous mountaintop aerie in Greece. You’ll love it, as long as you turn it off before the Margaret Thatcher impersonator (Janet Brown) appears at the end. B+

Box Office: $46.8 million/$185.4 million
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Theme Song Performed By: Carly Simon (”Nobody Does It Better”)
Fun Fact: The closing credits promise that ”James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only.” But after the success of 1977’s Star Wars, Moonraker was fast-tracked as the follow-up.
Plot: It’s a dose of double-0 détente after Russian and British submarines are hijacked by the sinister Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens). Bond and Barbara Bach’s KGB knockout Anya Amasova (a.k.a. Agent Triple X) head off to exotic Egypt looking for a highly classified microfilm and cross paths with the razor-toothed assassin Jaws (Richard Kiel). With his third time in the tux, Moore finally hits his stride as 007 and makes the role his own, thanks in no small part to an amphibious Lotus sports car and a rousing pre-opening-credits ski chase that ends with Bond jumping off a cliff and releasing a Union Jack parachute. Moore’s best Bond performance. A-

Box Office: $106.4 million/$356.4 million
Director: Martin Campbell
Theme Song Performed By: Tina Turner
Fun Fact: The title derives from the name of Fleming’s Jamaica estate, where he created James Bond and wrote all the novels.
Plot: Brosnan’s debut doesn’t merely rehabilitate Bond for a post-Cold War world — it renews his license to thrill. 007 faces former MI6 colleague Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), who’s brimming with rage over a failed mission in Russia nine years before (Bond managed to escape alone, mistakenly assuming his colleague was offed). ”I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you’ve killed,” Trevelyan says. ”Or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect.” Count us shaken and disturbed. But Bond gets his cyberpunk on with Russian hacker Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco), and together they foil Trevelyan’s techno-terror plot to destroy the world economy. A-

Box Office: $167.4 million/$596.4 million
Director: Martin Campbell
Theme Song Performed By: Chris Cornell (”You Know My Name”)
Fun Fact: Tsai Chin, who portrays one of Bond’s fellow poker players, was the lover who helped Connery’s 007 fake his death at the beginning of You Only Live Twice.
Plot: A back-to-basics reboot for the ages, Casino Royale reinvents 007 as a blunt instrument with a soul. In his first turn in Bond’s tux, Daniel Craig brings a macho directness to the familiar role. But for all its eye-popping action, the movie doesn’t just appeal to the adrenal glands — witness Bond’s broken heart over doomed love Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), and the high-stakes Montenegro poker game with blood-weeping terror financier Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) that became the series’ most suspenseful showdown in years. A-

Box Office: $63.6 million/$141.2 million
Director: Terence Young
Theme Song Performed By: Tom Jones
Fun Fact: Connery’s life was really in jeopardy during Bond’s shark-tank plunge, since a protective Plexiglas partition had an alarming four-foot gap.
Plot: Even Bond might admire the elegance of SPECTRE’s fiendish plan: Hijack a NATO bomber, steal its nuclear warheads, then blackmail the British and American governments for £100 million. A kaleidoscopic catalog of iconic images follows — a villain with an eye patch (Adolfo Celi’s lusty SPECTRE No. 2, Emilio Largo), a jet-pack escape, a henchman shot with a speargun, a swimming pool full of sharks, gorgeous underwater battles, and Bond twirling evil Fiona Volpe (redhead scorcher Luciana Paluzzi) into the path of her fellow assassin’s bullet. Thunderball also introduces the famous ”Bond-girl formula,” which dictates that our hero is likely to tangle with three types of women: an early ally who dies (Martine Beswick’s MI6 agent Paula Caplan), the villain’s henchwoman who dies (Volpe), and the ”Bond girl” proper who usually survives to the end (Largo’s mistress-turned-nemesis Domino Derval, played by Claudine Auger). A-

Box Office: $90 million (and counting)/$428.6 million (and counting)
Director: Sam Mendes
Theme Song Performed By: Adele
Fun Fact: Yes, that’s Daniel Craig behind the wheel of Bond’s legendary Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger (outfitted with it signature ejector-seat button). According to Mendes, although it appears that the classic sports car was riddled with bullets during the film’s climax, no DB5s were actually harmed in the making of the picture.
Plot: For 007’s 23rd outing, Craig is back with a bang in his best Bond outing to date. Mendes throws down the gauntlet right from the start as 007 chases a baddie across the rooftops of Istanbul, building to a chase atop a speeding train. From there, Bond is forced to do some soul-searching as a creepy cyberterrorist (played by a screne-stealingly lecherous Javier Bardem) is out to take down the MI6 agent and his spymaster, M (Judi Dench). Mendes keeps the pace brisk, hopscotching from Istanbul to Shanghai to London to the Scottish highlands, where Bond’s origin story is revealed with a psychological depth that few 007 installments have had. Not only Craig’s best outing, but one of the Best Bonds ever. A-

Box Office: $22.8 million/$82 million
Director: Peter Hunt
Theme Song Performed By: Louis Armstrong (”We Have All the Time in the World”)
Fun Fact: To explain the appearance of new leading man Lazenby, the filmmakers flirted with the idea of Bond getting plastic surgery.
Plot: Best remembered as the film in which the Australian Lazenby stepped in for Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has unfairly been tarred as a turkey and Lazenby as the franchise’s equivalent of fifth Beatle Pete Best. Both charges couldn’t be more off. The sixth installment in the 007 saga is actually one of the best — and most emotionally complex. Bond doesn’t just fall into bed with Diana Rigg’s Contessa Teresa di Vincenzo, he falls in love (they exchange I do’s before she’s gunned down). Telly Savalas hams it up perfectly as Blofeld, SPECTRE’s capo di tutti capi, scheming to hold the world’s food supply hostage with the help of his comely ”angels of death.” This is our first look at Bond as existential hero, and the man can’t catch a break. As Lazenby famously quips, ”This never happened to the other fellow.” A-

Box Office: $24.8 million/$78.9 million
Director: Terence Young
Theme Song Performed By: Matt Monro
Fun Fact: President John F. Kennedy listed Fleming’s original novel as one of his 10 favorite books. From Russia With Love was also the last film he ever saw — it was screened at the White House on Nov. 20, 1963.
Plot: SPECTRE brings the Cold War to a boil by duping Bond and a Russian Mata Hari (Daniela Bianchi) into stealing a much-coveted Lektor decoding device on its behalf. The brainy story pits 007 against two of his most fearsome adversaries: Robert Shaw’s stocky hitman Red Grant, whose Orient Express showdown is a slow-burn corker, and Bertolt Brecht veteran Lotte Lenya (of ”Mack the Knife” fame) as unforgettable shoe-dagger-wielding Rosa Klebb. A

Box Office: $51.1 million/$124.9 million
Director: Guy Hamilton
Theme Song Performed By: Shirley Bassey
Fun Fact: Before picking up his deadly bowler as Oddjob, the Hawaii-born Harold Sakata won a silver medal in weightlifting for the U.S. at the 1948 Olympics.
Plot: It’s the film that most 007 aficionados consider the gold standard of the series. Bullion-hoarding bad guy Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) attempts to attack Fort Knox after aiming a laser at 007’s royal jewels (”No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”). Goldfinger is festooned with indelible flourishes: the bowler-hatted henchman Oddjob (Sakata), a shapely corpse covered in 24-karat paint, the first appearance of Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 (with ejector seat), and, of course, a lethal lady called Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) — a naughty name the producers had to lobby the MPAA to keep. What’s not to love? A