The Power of the Blond Guy ! Or Something Else ?

You can't always be serious and talk about e-commerce, investing, customer relationships, etc, can you ?

I was spending some time this early morning browsing one of my favorite website, the Internet Movie Data Base (www.imdb.com), an Amazon company, and had a look at what recent James Bond movies grossed :

Casino Royale (2006) : $587M (ranks 35th in the all-time movie box office). Daniel Craig

Die Another Day (2002) : $425M (72nd). Pierce Brosnan.
The World is Not Enough (1999) :$352M (113rd). Pierce Brosnan.
Golden Eye (1995) : $352M (115th). Pierce Brosnan.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) : $347M (124th). Pierce Brosnan.

Well, it seems that a blond guy with blue eyes creates a major difference in the James Bond franchise !

The car also seems to make a difference : both the Aston Martin DBS in Casino Royale and the Vanquish in Die Another Day scored much better than the series of BMWs driven in the previous Bonds : Z3 in Golden Eye, 750il in Tomorrow Never Dies or the Z8 in The World is Not Enough.

However, in all fairness, Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965), which respectively grossed $125M and $141M, have done much better in constant dollars as you need to multiply by roughly 6 to obtain today value (ie c $750M and $850M). But again, Sean Connery had an edge, he was then driving his famous Aston DB5, probably the car most associated with the least discret MI6 agent ! This car briefly appeared again in Casino Royale.

Comments

[Ju]

Hum... I do not agree at all with your analysis.

First, Ok, Casino Royale is the James Bond that generated the most, but, hum, don't you think it's weird, that your list is also chronologically ordered? I would say that "big" movies tend to be bigger and bigger (more spectators by country, and more countries)... So ok, Casino Royale is the biggest, but it might have nothing to do (or very little) with its main actor.

Also, the car appears to be a little farfetched, I would bet that more than 95% of the people who actually saw the movie didn't know before what would be James Bond's car (did you?), hence, this could definetly not be a reason of its success!

For me the main reasons are :
- new kind of scenario
- broader and broader audience for this kind of movies

There could be a little percentage of movie-aware spectators that went to see it to see how would perform Craig, but, not that much...

[sebastien(ny)]

To me, the real James Bond is Sean Connery, that's it. Scottish, classy, uber man, the others look like wimps. Daniel Craig with his bodybuilding chiseled abs and pecs is really a pitiful shadow of what James Bond should be.
Please the real new James Bond stand up ?

[Michel de Guilhermier]

Hey guys, pity you don't understand that's it's really his blond hair which makes all the difference !!

[vodkistaïatouchka]

he looks like Poutine !