Quentin Tarantino was looking to adapt the James Bond story Casino Royale, but the 007 producers blocked the attempt, according to the director himself.
Speaking to Deadline, Tarantino explained that there was a point where Eon Productions, which produces the Bond movies, did not own the rights to Casino Royale (hence the '67 Casino Royale movie).
"We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to Casino Royale," Tarantino revealed. "And that's what I wanted to do after Pulp Fiction was do my version of Casino Royale, and it would've taken place in the '60s and wasn't about a series of Bond movies. We would have cast an actor and be one and done. So I thought we could do this."
He continued: "But then it turned out that [Bond producers] the Broccolis three years earlier figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did. And so what they did is they just made a blanket deal with the Fleming estate and said that: 'We have the movie rights to everything he's ever written. We’re going to just give you a bunch of money. This is for every single thing he's ever written. If anybody wants to make a movie out of it, they got to come to us.'"
Tarantino also explained that, while he never actually had a meeting with the Broccolis, he did hear their reasoning through the grapevine. "No, but I had people who knew them and everything," he said. "I was always told very flattering versions of like, 'Look, we love Quentin, but we make a certain kind of movies, and unless we fuck it up, we make a billion dollars every time we make that type of movie, okay? We don't want him to do it. Doesn't matter that it will still do good. It could fuck up our billion-dollar thing.'"
We can't think of anything more intriguing than a Quentin Tarantino Bond movie, so it's a shame that we'll never get to see his take on Casino Royale – the director has been clear that his next film, The Movie Critic, will be his last.
While you wait for The Movie Critic, fill out your watchlist with our guide to 2023's major movie release dates.
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