20 Things You Didn’t Know About Goldfinger (1964)
14. “Three More Ticks And Mr Goldfinger Would Have Hit The Jackpot.”
After narrowly averting the destruction of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, James Bond notes that Goldfinger was only three seconds away from achieving Operation Grand Slam: decimating the economy of the free world and increasing the value of his own gold.
Seeing the LED clock on Goldfinger's bomb ticking down towards "000", producer Harry Saltzman recognised a tongue-in-cheek opportunity to promote Double-0 Seven by showing that Goldfinger would have succeeded but for "007".
The idea behind having the clock stop at "003" was that Goldfinger was the third official Bond film. The concept was later recycled for the fifth Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967) in which a clock counting down in Ernst Stavro Blofeld's (Donald Pleasence's) volcano stops on "005".
However, Bond’s dialogue was not dubbed in post-production to correct the continuity error as Sean Connery was not available; he was enjoying a well-deserved break with his then-wife, Diane Cilento in Rome, Italy.