Every James Bond Film, Ranked

President Kennedy named Fleming's novel among his ten favourite books in Life magazine, and the film Terence Young made from it is the series at its leanest. The Orient Express compartment fight with Red Grant took three weeks to shoot, Connery and Robert Shaw doing most of the stunts themselves in a space the size of a wardrobe. No gadget worth mentioning, no lair — just tradecraft, dread, and a perfect villain.

George Lazenby announced during filming that he would play Bond exactly once, and his single outing is the series' saddest, strangest film. Louis Armstrong, gravely ill, recorded We Have All the Time in the World in one take. Critics shrugged in 1969; the reputation has flipped completely since, and the ending — Tracy shot dead in a drive-by minutes after the wedding — remains the only Bond finale that leaves a mark.

Martin Campbell rebooted this series twice, and the second rescue is the better film. Fans ran danielcraigisnotbond.com before a frame had screened, and the Daily Mirror sneered at James Bland; then the Madagascar crane chase arrived — freerunning founder Sébastien Foucan sprinting up the girders while Craig bulldozes through walls behind him — and the argument ended. Consensus puts it first or second all-time. Third here is the debate-bait discount.

Here is the fight you came for: the consensus number one, parked at four. Guy Hamilton's 1964 entry recouped its $3 million budget in two weeks and won the franchise's first Academy Award, Norman Wanstall's 1965 prize for sound-effects editing. The industrial laser creeping up the table toward Connery is still the best-staged threat in the series. But it invented the formula every sequel photocopied, and now it plays like the template.

Adele's theme won Best Original Song at the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, the first Bond song ever to win, and the film beneath it became the first in the series to clear $1 billion worldwide. Released fifty years after Dr. No, it turns for home when Bond pulls the dust sheet off the DB5 and drives M north to the Highlands. Shamelessly sentimental, and it earns every frame.

Roger Moore's best opens with the series' greatest single cut: stuntman Rick Sylvester skiing off Mount Asgard on Baffin Island for $30,000, the Union Jack parachute blooming in dead silence. Lewis Gilbert's second Bond built Pinewood's 007 Stage for $1.8 million just to hold its supertanker set, and the Lotus Esprit drives into the sea and becomes a submarine. Peak absurdity, delivered with total conviction.

Six years of legal disputes kept Bond off screens before Martin Campbell dragged him into the post-Soviet world. Wayne Michaels's bungee jump off the Contra Dam in Switzerland opens the film and still wins best-stunt polls; the St Petersburg tank chase took around six weeks to shoot and earns them. Judi Dench, the first woman to play M, instantly outclasses everyone. Over $356 million worldwide — Moonraker's series record finally fell.

Putting Dalton's revenge picture in the top ten is the hill this ranking dies on. Bond resigns after M revokes his licence, hunting the drug lord Sanchez alone in the only Bond film the BBFC originally rated 15. The tanker chase at La Rumorosa — an eighteen-wheeler popping a wheelie on a mountain road — is the series' most underrated finale. Lowest inflation-adjusted gross of all 25 films; the most nerve.

United Artists put up just $1 million, with a late $100,000 top-up for the climax, and bought a sixty-year franchise. Terence Young's original moves slower than its reputation, but two beats are permanent: Connery lighting a cigarette at Le Cercle before saying his own name, and Ursula Andress walking out of the sea — voted the sexiest scene in film history by Channel 4 in 2003. The blueprint, before it hardened.

Timothy Dalton's debut plays like a course correction nobody requested and everybody needed. John Glen gives the new Bond an Aston Martin V8 for the Czechoslovakia run, then stages the fight with Necros on the open cargo ramp of a Hercules in mid-flight. A-ha and John Barry clashed so badly over the theme song that two versions of it exist. Serious without being grim, and the most rewatchable Dalton.

Adjusted for ticket-price inflation it is still the series' biggest earner in North America, and John Stears took home the 1966 Academy Award for its visual effects. The climactic underwater battle — Navy divers against the Disco Volante crew in open water — looked like nothing else in 1965, and it is also why the film drags now: everything below the surface runs at half speed. Enormous, gorgeous, one act too long.

John Glen's directing debut yanked the series back to earth after Moonraker: deliberately grittier, fewer gadgets, actual stakes. The finale climbs the monastery cliffs at Meteora while protesting monks stayed shut inside, and it ends the film on fingertips instead of fireworks. Moore resisted kicking Locque's teetering car off the cliff — Bond-like but not Roger Moore Bond-like, he argued — and that flash of cruelty is the hardest edge his Bond ever showed.

Ross Kananga suggested the stunt of running straight across live crocodiles, then performed it himself; it took five attempts, and one crocodile tore his trousers. Moore's first outing swaps SPECTRE for blaxploitation, and its Louisiana bayou boat chase wrecked seventeen of twenty-six boats while a 110-foot speedboat jump set a Guinness record. Paul McCartney and Wings lost the Best Original Song Oscar to The Way We Were; the song outlived the verdict.

Craig's farewell slipped from April 2020 to autumn 2021 while cinemas sat closed, then ran 163 minutes, long enough to close a fifteen-year arc properly. Cary Joji Fukunaga, the first American filmmaker to direct an Eon Bond, opens with the DB5 spitting fire in the stone streets of Matera. Billie Eilish's theme won Best Original Song at the 94th Academy Awards in 2022. Baggy in the middle; the ending dares something no Eon film ever had.

Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay with no screenwriting experience whatsoever, and the pulp invention shows. Ken Adam's volcano lair set cost $1 million at Pinewood and was visible from three miles away; every secret base since has been quoting it. The Little Nellie autogyro dogfight needed more than 85 take-offs and cost cameraman John Jordan his foot to a rotor blade. Connery, visibly restless, is the weak link in his own vehicle.

Beating Never Say Never Again was the real assignment in 1983's Battle of the Bonds, and John Glen's second entry won it: $187.5 million worldwide, while the rival Connery film managed $55 million in North America. Bond defusing a nuclear warhead in full clown make-up is either the series' nadir or its most honest self-portrait; the Acrostar mini-jet threading an open hangar in the pre-title sequence is indefensible fun either way.

Opening opposite Titanic on 19 December 1997 should have been a death sentence; second place and a $25.1 million start counted as survival. Brosnan steering the BMW from the back seat with a flip phone, flat on the floor and grinning through a Hamburg parking-garage chase actually shot at Brent Cross, is peak nineties Bond. Michelle Yeoh out-fights everyone yet was barred from doing her own stunts. Underrated, if never essential.

Fourteen minutes of boat chase down the Thames before the title song — the series' longest cold open until No Time to Die outlasted it — and the movie never matches its opening. Sophie Marceau's Elektra King, the writers' pitch of a female main villain that sold the producers, is the best thing here. Renard, a bullet in his brain deadening his senses, deserved a sharper script. Variety called Denise Richards's nuclear physicist the least plausible in movie history.

Star Wars money moved this one up the queue — Eon shelved For Your Eyes Only to chase the space boom — and audiences repaid the cynicism: $210.3 million worldwide, the series record until GoldenEye in 1995. The pre-title free fall, Bond wrestling a pilot for his parachute across 88 real skydives, is genuinely great filmmaking. Then Bond reaches orbit with a laser rifle, and dignity stays on the launch pad. Knowingly, profitably ridiculous.

Sam Mendes opens with the Craig era's best cold open: a Day of the Dead tracking shot through Mexico City stitched from six takes, with 1,500 extras and a quarter-million paper flowers. Later a Guinness-record explosion in Morocco — 8,140 litres of kerosene — fails to wake the plot. Sam Smith's Writing's on the Wall still took the Best Original Song Oscar. It grossed $880.7 million, a fifth less than Skyfall, and feels like it.

Connery came back for a record $1.25 million fee and gave all of it to the Scottish International Education Trust — the classiest thing connected to the film. Guy Hamilton shot Las Vegas across eight real hotels, and the moon buggy chase, flailing arms and shredding fibreglass tyres in the desert, is the series at maximum camp. Connery coasts, the tone wobbles, and somehow the Vegas sleaze keeps it watchable.

Duran Duran sent the theme to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest any Bond song has charted, and the film spends two hours failing to match it. Moore was 57 during filming — his seventh and final outing — and every fight is cut around that fact. Still, Christopher Walken's Zorin swinging an axe at Bond on top of the Golden Gate Bridge is a finale better films never get.

Christopher Lee was Ian Fleming's step-cousin — Fleming had once suggested him for Dr. No — and his Scaramanga deserves a better movie around him. The corkscrew car jump over the river was modelled by Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory as the first computer-simulated stunt, and Loren Bumps Willert landed it first take; John Barry then dropped a slide whistle over it, a joke he regretted for years. Lee glides while everything else clunks.

Written mid-strike and it shows. Craig admitted the production had the bare bones of a script when the writers' walkout hit, leaving him and his director rewriting scenes themselves, and the result burns Casino Royale's goodwill in a blur of cuts. One sequence survives whole: Bond stalking his targets through a floating-stage Tosca at Bregenz, 1,500 extras in the dark below. A rough draft released as a finished film.

Twentieth film, fortieth anniversary, dead last. Brosnan deserved better than an invisible Aston Martin Vanquish and a para-surf escape where every wave and glacier is computer-generated — even Roger Moore complained about invisible cars and dodgy CGI. It grossed $432 million worldwide, sixth-best of 2002, proof that box office and quality travel separately. Its one lasting gift: it made the Casino Royale reboot unavoidable.