Every Bond Movie Pre-Title Scene Ranked - Worst To Best

The first pre-title sequence to feature James Bond himself helped to establish the formula for these action focused, stylish segments.

007 sneaks into a Latin American drug laboratory (equipped with a handy duck disguise, no less) and sets some timed explosives. All that’s left, then, is to slip out of his scuba gear to reveal the dazzling white tuxedo underneath, and head into a bar to wait for the boom.

The real centrepiece of the opening, though, is his discreet rendezvous with “unfinished business”; namely an exotic beauty he’d locked eyes with earlier. At first she seems nothing more than a way to kill time until his flight to Miami, but soon ends up as a human shield when Bond is attacked by an interloping thug.

Of course, he’s no match for 007 and so a brief scuffle, an electrifying bath, and a superbly timed pun later, and it’s onto the dulcet tones of Dame Shirley Bassey to welcome us to an all-time classic Bond adventure.

Truly a short but sweet segment that introduced audiences to the joys of James Bond effortlessly breezing through the kind of side-mission that, for him, is little more than another day at the office.

Best moment: “Shocking. Positively shocking.” It’s the kind of joke that would seem cringeworthy were it emerging from any other lips, but when it comes from James Bond is immortally cool.