8 Ridiculous Behind-The-Scenes Struggles Over Movie Rights

2. Thunderball Co-Writer Remakes It in 1983 (And Attempts To Do It Again In The 1990s)

Austin Powers' Dr. Evil is an obvious parody of James Bond's archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the leader of the criminal organization SPECTRE. The reason I mention this is if you're only familiar with the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig Bond films you might not have even heard of Blofeld. That's because Blofeld has been missing from the official Bond series since 1971, save for an unnamed appearance in the pre-credits sequence of 1981's For Your Eyes Only. That is because Blofeld and SPECTRE were created while Bond author Ian Fleming and Irish filmmaker Kevin McClory were writing the script for a potential first Bond film in the late 1950s. Fleming then used the original script as the basis of the eighth Bond novel Thunderball. McClory sued and was given the film rights to Thunderball, which he used when he produced Thunderball as the fourth James Bond film in 1965 with Eon Productions, the official production company of the James Bond films. That would have been that, but McClory still held the film rights to Thunderball and he intended to use them. On top of that, a few years later a judge ruled that McClory created Blofeld and SPECTRE so Eon could no longer use either in its Bond movies. Though Eon tried to stop him, in 1983 McClory produced Never Say Never Again, a loose remake of Thunderball starring original Bond Sean Connery, who had quit the role after 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. Never Say Never Again was released only four months after the "official" 1983 Eon Bond film, Octopussy, starring Connery's replacement Roger Moore. Despite the return of Connery in Never Say Never Again, Octopussy actually did slightly better at the box office. Again that would have been that, but as the title says, never say never again. McClory wanted to utilize his Thunderball rights again in the late 1990s to make another loose remake titled Warhead 2000 AD. Following his playbook by the letter, McClory intended to cast former Bond Timothy Dalton or Liam Neeson, who declined the opportunity to play Bond in 1995's GoldenEye. However, McClory ended up selling his rights to Sony, which also held the rights to the first Bond novel Casino Royale. Once Sony announced that it was planning to make its own Bond series based on the material in these two novels a number of lawsuits followed. Eventually Sony ended up swapping the Bond rights it had with MGM (which distributed the official Eon Bond series) for MGM's Spider-Man rights in March 1999. The result has worked out well for both sides, with MGM having massive box office success with the subsequent James Bond films and Sony doing the same with its Spider-Man franchise. As for McClory? Despite selling his rights to Sony he continued to insist he was proceeding with the third version of Thunderball almost until his death in 2006. However, it wasn't until November 2013 that MGM announced that it finally settled its outstanding legal issues with McClory's estate regarding the ownership of Blofeld and SPECTRE, meaning future Eon Bond films could once again including include these classic elements.