{"id":696995,"date":"2026-06-11T03:59:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T03:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/696995\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T03:59:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T03:59:09","slug":"steven-spielberg-cheerfully-informs-bond-franchise-it-missed-its-shot-with-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/696995\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Spielberg cheerfully informs Bond franchise it missed its shot with him"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fact that Steven Spielberg never made a James Bond movie is actually kind of surprising\u2014including, it sounds like, to Spielberg himself, who repeatedly petitioned former series producer and gatekeeper Cubby Broccoli for a shot at the superspy. (And not, like, Sugarland Express\u00a0Spielberg, either; this was in the wake of\u00a0Jaws, when there probably wasn\u2019t a bigger box office sure thing on the planet.) As recounted by Spielberg\u2014currently making the press rounds for his new film Disclosure Day<\/a>\u2014that wasn\u2019t the only time Broccoli shot him down for the franchise, either: A few years later, the venerable producer reached out to the young wunderkind for permission to use the five-note sequence from\u00a0Close Encounters Of The Third Kind\u00a0for a gag in\u00a0Moonraker, and Spielberg (per Variety<\/a>) pitched him on a little quid pro quo: The song, in exchange for a chance to direct a Bond movie. Broccoli declined, and, nice guy that he is, Spielberg let him have the tune anyway.<\/p>\n

In laying out these stories for the The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, Spielberg said he wasn\u2019t sure why Broccoli kept turning him down. \u201cThey consistently turned me down\u2014at least, Broccoli did. He never explained why he wasn\u2019t letting me into the Bond family.\u201d (We suspect it might be a British thing; a non-Englishman didn\u2019t helm a Bond movie until New Zealand\u2019s Martin Campbell directed GoldenEye\u00a0in 1995, while Cary Joji Fukunaga only became the first American to direct a franchise installment with\u00a0No Time To Die<\/a>\u00a0in 2021.) Ironically, it was pretty clear that the Bond folks were at least watching\u00a0Spielberg\u2019s movies; after Spielberg\u2019s old buddy George Lucas cheered him up over his multiple double-0-rejections by pitching him on Raiders Of The Lost Ark, some pretty obvious elements from that adventure serial throwback popped up attached to Roger Moore in 1983\u2019s\u00a0Octopussy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, Spielberg claims to be over the obsession (albeit in a \u201cTell my ex I\u2019m doing great\u201d sort of way): \u201cIf they ever asked me to make a Bond film now,\u201d he said during the Disclosure Day press tour, \u201cMy answer would be: \u2018You can\u2019t afford me.\u2019\u201d Sassy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fact that Steven Spielberg never made a James Bond movie is actually kind of surprising\u2014including, it sounds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":696996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-696995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/696996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}