The Bond Experience
Embarking on a Bondathon — thoughts, opinions and a comprehensive ranking.
The name’s Blundell, Laura Blundell, and I’m about to spend the next two months in the company of a man who needs no introduction.
It’s been five years since the last Bond film – the 2021 Daniel Craig send-off No Time to Die – and as a self-professed (though only partially qualified) Bond fan, I’m getting antsy. In Bond era gaps, this one is beaten only by the one between Timothy Dalton’s Licence To Kill (1989) and Pierce Brosnan’s GoldenEye (1995), during which time:
the Berlin wall came down,
the Soviet Union dissolved, and
the Cold War ended.
In Bond terms (that is, a franchise largely dependent on those pesky Russians), this is huge. But comparatively, it’s not actually that wild considering everything that’s happened in the world since No Time to Die. Speaking strictly in production terms, over the last five years, Bond has:
been snatched out of the hands of Eon’s Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli by Amazon,
gained Denis Villeneuve as the next film’s director and Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight as its writer, and
started casting discussions, with next-round auditions set for August this year.
But as the road to Bond 26 continues to take shape, it got me thinking about my relationship with this franchise and how it’s not as deep as it could be.
As a millennial, I grew up with the Brosnan and Craig eras and have tried, now and then, to fill in the gaps as time and will permits. At the time of writing this – that is, 11th June, 2026 – I’ve seen two Connerys, two Daltons and precisely none of the others.
So, while waiting for Bond 26 to eventuate, and with my dad’s Bond 50 Blu ray collection still sitting on my shelf three years after I asked to borrow it, I figure now is as good a time as any to do a full watchthrough in order of release and write a journal of sorts throughout scoring each film, thus establishing myself as ‘fully Bond qualified’ and therefore ‘allowed’ to express my opinions on whoever gets cast as the next 007.
How I’m measuring success
While this piece is more of a live diary through the franchise than a ranking listicle, I do want to provide some sort of score for each film and era beyond just my own personal enjoyment. So, in the interest of attempted objectivity and in the spirit of 007, I’ve come up with seven ranking criteria. They are:
Bond himself
Bond girl
Villain
Song
Opening titles
Plot/action/gadgets (including stunts, action sequences and overall storytelling)
Franchise identity (iconicity, uniqueness, contributions to the franchise)
Each of these seven criteria will yield a score out of 10, accounting for 70 points of each film’s final score out of 100. The remaining 30% will come from my personal enjoyment of each film.
I should also specify that I’m not counting Casino Royale (1967) or Never Say Never Again in this Bondathon as they are non-Eon productions and they’re not in my dad’s box set.