James Bond Joins Villain to Solve Overpopulation In Rejected Script Pitch for ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’
James Bond has saved the world no less than 25 times. And in every film, Britain’s top spy is ideologically opposed to the villain’s plan. But what if he wasn’t? What if he actually agreed with the villain for once and joined forces with them to save humanity from itself? This is exactly what Nicholas Meyer had in mind when he was called before the head honchos at EON Productions and MGM/UA to pitch a plot for Pierce Brosnan’s second Bond film in 1996.
Meyer who wrote and directed Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, long considered one of the all-time great Trek films, also directed Brosnan in The Deceivers. The two remained good friends and Meyer also happened to be related through marriage to Roger Spottiswoode, the director of Tomorrow Never Dies.
When Meyer got the call to pitch a Bond film, Tomorrow Never Lies (the film’s original name) was in trouble. Bruce Fierstein had turned in a first draft that involved a villain wanting to disrupt the handover of Hong Kong by the British back to the Chinese. Spottiswoode, quite rightly, felt that creating a fictional plot around a real-life event scheduled to happen in a few months was a terrible idea.
So a cadre of writers was brought in to pitch alternative ideas. Meyer was one of many. And he had the most bonkers idea of all, which clearly wouldn’t have worked.
Meyer recalled the pitch in Mark Edlitz’s book, The Lost Adventures of James Bond.
He arrived at the writer’s room at EON’s offices in Piccadilly London. Faced with a room of 30 people, Meyer confidently outlined his pitch.
He first presented the problem with all Bond films: the James Bond formula itself.
Meyer likened the formula to an “English sonnet”, describing it as “formally rigid”.
The films, before Daniel Craig, often comfortably followed an established formula: a pre-titles sequence, followed by banter with Miss Moneypenny, briefing on a new assignment with M, and then, as Meyer put it, “followed by stunt sequence, stunt sequence, stunt sequence until Bond actually meets Mister Big in his lair. Mister Big says, no Mister Bond it’s not about the money, it’s really about X.”
Meyer said he had a solution that would turn the formula on its head.
““Now imagine that all of that has happened and Mister Big in his lair says, all the obstacle courses that you have negotiated were actually tests to see if you really were the man that I need you to be. Because I think when you get to know me really well, Mister Bond, you’ll find that fundamentally I am a people person. But there’s too many of them.”
Then he flips a switch and all these monitors come on with every image of overpopulation that you can possibly imagine. Starving people in Ethiopia or wherever we’re shooting. There’s plenty of them, traffic jams where cars are immobile under these smog-laden skies in Los Angeles, and so on and so on and so on.
He says, “Mister Bond, even lemmings, even lemmings know what to do when they grow too numerous. I am willing to bite the bullet on the life and death issue for this planet that no politician will confront or face or mention there are too many people and the only way we can survive is to cull the herd.
007, that’s some kind of license [to kill] isn’t it? Tell me 007, how much game are you allowed to bag with that license? I’m imploring your help, sir, will you help me save planet Earth?”
And at this point, they’re all sitting there with their jaws hanging open and I continue. Bond says, “You’re right. I will help you.” So basically what Mister Big wants is to start a war between India and China, the two most populous nations on the face of the earth, and Bond says he’ll help him.”
Meyer was very pleased with his pitch. But he was met with more than a few stunned faces in the room.
He said the best villains are always the ones you agree with. This Bond villain would have predated the MCU’s Thanos and his similar plan by two decades. But even The Avengers won’t help him. Here, Meyer wanted to convince EON and MGM/UA that Bond would.
The next day Meyer returned and was given a flat “no” from the big brass at EON and MGM/UA. Surprisingly, he was shocked and asked why his idea was rejected. The answer given was that it was “Too serious”, a polite English way of saying “You don’t get Bond.” Meyer admitted that he never really liked James Bond and that he found him “cartoony” compared with the work of John Le Carre and “real spies” like Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File starring Michael Caine
Overpopulation is a problem in many countries. But having Bond willingly pull the trigger that kills millions just wouldn’t win over audiences. Meyer, an American writer, failed to see the irony of a British agent triggering a war between two countries previously under British colonial rule. And he failed to understand that Bond would never kill millions of people, no matter the reason.
Unsurprisingly, Meyer was never asked back to pitch a Bond film. Feirstein returned, dropping the Hong Kong handover plot in favor of a media mogul wanting to start a world war for TV ratings. Tomorrow Never Dies was a box office smash and one of 1997’s biggest films.
