Thanks to everyone for correcting me on the Dalton/Bond era. I grew up on James Bond with Pierce Brosnan so my knowledge is a tad limited.
Out Of My Vulcan Mind wrote:
International box office has always been the center of gravity of the Bond series, so you really need to focus on the worldwide gross rather than the domestic gross. Moonraker may be regarded as a weak Bond film by most fans and critics, but it was a smash hit. It's the highest grossing of Roger Moore's Bond films at $210.3 million worldwide. Moore then delivered $202.8 million with For Your Eyes Only, $187.5 million with Octopussy, and then dropped to $152.4 million with A View to a Kill. Dalton's The Living Daylights was successful in bringing the gross back up close to the $200 million level, bringing in $191.2 million. Licence to Kill then dropped to $156.2 million, with a particularly poor domestic performance, but it was still a profitable film and the producers were willing to go ahead with a third Dalton Bond film until the legal troubles hit. Brosnan and Craig's tenures as Bond have, however, led to much bigger box office revivals for the series than Dalton's.
I get what you're saying. I have to admit I'm surprised
Moonraker was such a hit.
Torg wrote:
I don't know what you mean by him not being remembered that greatly. True, he didn't have the long stream of films that Connery or Moore had, so he gets lost in the muddle. But his preformance as Bond was generally well regarded by critics and fan circles. Average viewers who don't know much about James Bond seem to assume that his movies were creative and finical flops and that was why he was "fired", which is horribly not the case.
Well, whenever I hear discussions about Bond, and who is the best Bond, Timothy Dalton usually falls to the wayside. I guess you can say that his tenure was cut short thanks to the legal troubles, so he didn't have time to build a successful stream of films like Connery, Moore, or Brosnan (you could argue the same for Craig, that is, if his third film doesn't go into production, how will people remember him years later). I've only seen
License to Kill out of Dalton's films, and I have to admit I wasn't impressed. Dalton just seemed to lack a certain charisma in the role.
I've been noticing that Dalton's films have been getting a renewed interest in the wake of Craig's Bond films which doesn't surprise me, considering Dalton's take is very much like Craig's take on the character.
Really? At least Craig has some charisma. I think Dalton was just too stoic and flat in the role, but that's just my opinion. I think also another thing is that Craig had much more to work with in his two films so far than Dalton did in his. I mean, Craig was able to approach the character in a way no one has been able to, since he wasn't really inheriting the baggage of the twenty films that came before. He could bring a new spin and a new perspective to the role, and I think that allowed him some flexibility.
I also think one of the biggest things why I prefer Craig over Dalton, and certainly Craig over Brosnan or Moore, is that Craig has been able to mix a certain cold-heartedness with vulnerability, which is a difficult task, but he does it seamlessly in my opinion. Dalton, to me, could never do that, but maybe that's because of the material he had to work with.
That and
License to Kill felt too much like a generic action film. I know that's the same complaint
Quantum of Solace gets, but at least it felt "Bondian" with the technology and the globe-trotting.
License to Kill honestly felt too homogenized, or too "American", if that makes sense.
