20 Things You Didn't Know About Licence To Kill (1989)
11. “It’s Time To Start Cutting Overheads”
Franz Sanchez’s financial adviser, William Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke) is devoted to making the drug lord’s operations as profitable and reliable as possible.
Therefore, when James Bond sets fire to Sanchez’s cocaine laboratories inside the Olimpatec Meditation Institute, Truman-Lodge starts to lose his cool, insisting that they should save the facility because it cost $32 million to set up. With his constant money worries, Truman-Lodge ultimately earns his boss’s wrath and is later killed by Sanchez in a hail of gunfire.
Truman-Lodge’s money woes were an in-joke to the film’s actual finances: Licence to Kill was kept on a strict budget of $32 million due to the overspending on Moonraker (1979), which had affected the budgets of all of the Bond films made in the 1980s.
Whilst the film made a tidy profit with a worldwide box office take of $156 million, this was not an impressive figure when compared with the earnings made by previous Bond films.
Executives at MGM/UA were not convinced that Timothy Dalton's James Bond was being accepted by Amerian audiences and rumours still circulate as to whether he resigned as Bond or whether Cubby Broccoli was reluctantly forced to dismiss him in favour of a more universally accepted actor during the pre-production of GoldenEye (1995).