The Battle for Bond

The Battle for Bond – The Genesis of Cinema's Greatest Hero
AuthorRobert Sellers
LanguageEnglish
SubjectFilm
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherTomahawk Press Publishers
Publication date
1 July 2007
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (paperback)
Pages264 pp (first edition)
272 pp (second edition)
ISBN0-9531926-3-6 (Tomahawk press)
OCLC154708298

The Battle for Bond (2007), by Robert Sellers, is a cinema history book of how the literary character James Bond metamorphosed to the cinema James Bond. The book details the collaboration among film producer Kevin McClory, novelist Ian Fleming, screenwriter Jack Whittingham and others to create the film Thunderball.[1]

After the film project's collapse, without his collaborators' permission, Fleming based his Thunderball (1961) novel upon their joint work.[1] In 1963 McClory and Whittingham sued him for plagiarism. The Battle for Bond concerns the court case.

Kevin McClory won the film rights and chose a single co-production deal with Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli: Thunderball (1965) that was released at Christmas. McClory's court victory also entitled him to remake Thunderball (1965) as Never Say Never Again (1983), again with Sean Connery as James Bond, the cinematic competition Broccoli had tried to legally ban.[1] With the remake, McClory attempted to continue with his own James Bond film series, but was stopped after legal action by Broccoli and MGM.[1] In a later unsuccessful lawsuit, McClory went further and now claimed that he created the cinematic James Bond, and demanded a share of the three billion dollars earned by the official Eon film series.[citation needed]