The James Bond Film That Was Nearly ‘More Austin Powers Than Austin Powers’

When is a James Bond film not a James Bond film? When it’s 1983’s Never Say Never Again, which saw the return of Sean Connery as Bond after he’d famously sworn that he’d “never again” star as the super-spy. (Yep, that’s where they got the title.)

How is Never Say Never Again not a Bond film? Well, it’s complicated. Head back to the 1960s, when writer Kevin McClory worked with Ian Fleming to develop the story that would later become the basis for the Bond film Thunderball. Fleming turned the story into a novel, but didn’t give McClory any credit. In a successful lawsuit, McClory secured a production credit on Thunderball and the rights to remake the story as a film ten years after the original hit theaters. 

That remake became Never Say Never Again, a James Bond movie that exists outside the canon of the long-running Cubby Broccoli series. McClory, screenwriter Jack Whittingham and an uncredited Connery came up with a loony screenplay for the project that threatened to veer into Mad Magazine territory. 

“The script they came up with was Star Wars underwater,” according to Bond historian Robert Sellers, as reported by Far Out. “It had these mechanical sharks with bombs on their back. I mean, it was more Austin Powers than Austin Powers. There was a big helicopter fight on the Statue of Liberty at the end. It would have been incredible. Stupid, but incredible.” 

The only reason those shenanigans didn’t make it to the big screen: McClory and company only had narrow rights to remake Thunderball . When the story threatened to become an insane but original Bond epic, the writers had to revert to the previous plot points. 

Dick Clement, who worked on the Never Say Never Again script, theorized that Connery’s outrageous plot ideas might have been “Sean saying ‘Fuck you’” to the series’s longtime producers.

Did Mike Myers get his hands on a copy of the early Never Say Never Again drafts?  While Thunderball incorporated the threat of killer sharks, Dr. Evil wanted to go one better in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. “I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.” 

Sure sounds like mechanical sharks with bombs on their backs to me. 

Connery later revealed more bonkers details in his version of the screenplay, according to SlashFilm. “We had all sorts of exotic events. You know those airplanes that were disappearing over the Bermuda Triangle? We had SPECTRE doing that. There was this fantastic fleet of planes under the sea, a whole world of stuff had been brought down. They were going to attack the financial nerve center of the United States by going in through the sewers of New York … and take over the Statue of Liberty, which is quite easy.” 

Mike Myers, if you’re reading this, Connery might have provided the plot to Austin Powers 4: Never Say Sequel Again.