Quentin Tarantino nearly made a James Bond movie

Shaken, not stirred, motherf*cker: Quentin Tarantino has revealed his scrapped plans for a James Bond movie in the wake of Pulp Fiction’s success.

Tarantino has flirted with putting his stamp on a pre-established IP before. In the ’90s, he met with the producer who owned the rights to Luke Cage, hoping to have Laurence Fishburne in the part. Superheroes clearly tempted him, as he’s been attached to Silver Surfer, Green Lantern, and Iron Man projects over the years.

Perhaps most famously, the writer-filmmaker was set to direct his own Star Trek movie. Unfortunately, development on the film went into darkness by 2020.

While discussing his final feature, The Movie Critic, Tarantino revealed his earlier ambitions to helm a James Bond movie, which would have been based on one of Ian Fleming’s most famous stories.

Quentin Tarantino wanted to make a Casino Royale James Bond movie

Long before Daniel Craig’s iconic debut as 007 in 2006’s Casino Royale, Tarantino tried to put the wheels in motion for his own take on the novel.

“We reached out to the Ian Fleming people, and they had suggested that they still own the rights to Casino Royale,” he said.

“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.”

Sony Pictures

Alas, Albert and Barbara Broccoli were a few steps ahead. “But then it turned out that the Broccolis three years earlier figured out somebody was going to try to do what I did,” he continued.

“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 never had a formal meeting with the longtime Bond producers, but he “had people who knew them and everything. I was always told very flattering versions of like, ‘Look, we love Quentin, but we make a certain kind of movies, and unless we f*ck it up, we make a billion dollars every time we make that type of movie, OK? We don’t want him to do it. Doesn’t matter that it will still do good. It could f*ck up our billion-dollar thing.'”

You can find out everything we know about Bond 26, the next movie in the James Bond franchise, here.