20 Things You Didn’t Know About Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

20. “Tomorrow’s News Today.”

MGM authorised Bond 18 in the last ten days of production on GoldenEye as the studio wanted the film’s release to coincide with MGM's public stock offering in 1997, creating intense pressure to release the movie on time.

Novelist, Donald E. Westlake penned a script around the British handover of Hong Kong to China on 1st July 1997, in which the villain stood to be ruined by the handover and plotted to raid Hong Kong’s vaults with a submersible vacuum (the initial version of Carver’s menacing sea drill) before destroying the island using a chemical compound.

This was considered too controversial, but the filmmakers wanted Double-0 Seven to return to the Far East. Westlake later adapted the rejected script into his posthumously-released 2017 novel, Forever and a Death.

Bruce Feirstein focused his own draft screenplay on a megalomaniacal media baron, claiming that “words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery”.

Director, Roger Spottiswoode invited seven Hollywood screenwriters to London to rework Feirstein’s script, choosing Nicholas Meyer to rewrite it, although Dan Petrie, Jr. and David Campbell Wilson also contributed to it.

Feirstein then produced a final draft, remaining present during filming to revise and create scenes; he received the sole screenwriter’s credit for the film.