Every James Bond Movie, Ranked Worst to Best
With this month's arrival (finally!) of No Time to Die, there have now been 25 official films in the EON-produced James Bond film franchise based on author Ian Fleming's British spy character. In the gallery on this page, we rank every one of those films—plus two additional Bond features from outside producers—from worst to best based on their Metascores, which represent the consensus of a group of top professional film critics.
Right now, it's fairly easy to find most of the Bond films on streaming services (and if it's not on the streaming service you have, it likely will be shortly, as the films are deleted from and re-added to various services every few months). That could change in the future thanks to a recent deal by Amazon to acquire MGM, which currently holds the home video rights to most of the Bond catalog, though there are no definitive plans to make Prime Video the exclusive home of 007 ... yet.
All photos courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios except Casino Royale (1967) by Columbia Pictures and Never Say Never Again by Warner Bros.
The year: 1997
The 007: Pierce Brosnan
The (non-UK) location(s): Saigon, Hamburg, unspecified location at Russian border
The theme song: "Tomorrow Never Dies" performed by Sheryl Crow
The first Bond film following the death of longtime producer Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli (whose family, including daughter Barbara Broccoli, still controls EON Productions, which continues to produce the 007 films), Tomorrow Never Dies was also the worst-reviewed of Brosnan's four Bond films.
Jonathan Pryce—playing a Rupert Murdoch-like media mogul who attempts to start World War III—Michelle Yeoh, and Teri Hatcher (plus, in very small roles, future Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes and Abbey star Hugh Bonneville) also starred for Turner & Hooch director Roger Spottiswoode (directing his sole Bond film), and the unenthusiastic reviews did little to dent the film's strong box office performance (which likely would have been even stronger had it not opened the same day as Titanic).
The title, by the way, comes not from any Fleming work or the author's life, but from a typo: It was originally written as "Tomorrow Never Lies," a reference to a newspaper (Tomorrow) owned by the film's villain. But the studio preferred the mistyped version.
“Tomorrow Never Dies works too hard to keep the James Bond franchise going, sacrificing Bond's signature light comedy and stylish playfulness to become just another hectic action movie.” —Jay Carr, The Boston Globe
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