How MGM Nearly Replaced James Bond With a Rival Spy Series

For decades, James Bond has been a fixture in Hollywood, shaping the world of action movies since the early '60s. It's hard to picture the film industry without the legendary secret agent, and even harder to imagine MGM without its most famous franchise. Yet, there was a time when the studio seriously thought about ending Bond’s run for good.

Originally, United Artists handled the first dozen Bond films, but after merging with MGM in the early '80s, the studio took over. From that point on, MGM became almost inseparable from the British spy, backing every adventure from Octopussy onward. With the Broccoli family stepping back and MGM now part of Amazon Studios, the company’s connection to the franchise is stronger than ever. Still, it’s almost unbelievable that MGM once considered pulling the plug on 007 and launching a brand-new spy saga instead.

Legal Battles and Studio Frustration

The longest gap between Bond movies—until the recent pause after No Time to Die—came between Timothy Dalton’s and Pierce Brosnan’s time as the lead. Legal disputes and contract issues left the franchise in limbo, with no clear path forward. The delays dragged on so long that MGM started looking at other options. One idea was to buy the rights to a different set of spy novels and use them to create a rival series.

“At one point, MGM execs became irritated with the slow progress, and they optioned the Quiller spy series of novels and threatened to churn out a Quiller film series, just to prove they could,”

John Cork wrote in Nobody Does It Better. The studio wasn’t interested in having Dalton finish his third film, and with no script or director in place, they were open to alternatives.

Bond’s Struggle With a New Generation

Jeff Kleeman, who played a key role in bringing Bond back with GoldenEye, explained that the character’s popularity had faded with younger audiences. When Frank Mancuso took over as MGM’s chairman in 1993, he ordered a marketing survey to gauge interest. The results were disappointing.

“What the marketing survey revealed that was because it had been over a decade since there had been a Bond movie that the audience cared about, the younger generation of filmgoers, the generation which studios are always seeking, was completely oblivious to Bond,”

Kleeman said. Many didn’t know who Bond was, or saw him as a relic their fathers enjoyed.

“Neither response being impressive to MGM,”

he added.

GoldenEye and the Return of 007

In the end, cooler heads won out. Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye brought Bond back in a big way, breathing new life into the franchise. MGM’s threats to replace 007 never materialized, and the only full-length Quiller adaptation remains 1966’s The Quiller Memorandum, starring George Segal. The agent with a license to kill survived one of his toughest off-screen battles, proving once again that nobody does it better.