Just genuinely curious based on a conservation with my elderly parents yesterday as my dad isn’t 100% sure, but he reckons it was probably years of them being shown on television through the 70s and into the 80s that really turned it into a major global institution/franchise.

7 comments

  2. I first saw them in the late 70s on TV, and it was a big deal then. Definitely a cultural icon by that point.

  3. James Bond films were shown after the Queen’s speech every Christmas day afternoon during the 80s and 90s. So yeah, pretty popular.

  4. The only films we went to the cinema with my dad to see when they came out. Mum took us to see kids stuff, but dad took us for Bond films – first I remember was Thunderball (1965), but we caught most of the Connery films.

  5. For what it’s worth, my Mother & Father in-law have seen every bond film at the cinema as they came out. (The films, not my in-laws!).

  6. They were big from day one. The books were huge long before the films; that’s why they made the films.

  7. Something like one third of the US population went to see Goldfinger at the cinema. It was also one of the first movies franchises to have a load of merchandise based around it, such as model cars of the DB5.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like