You know how a Bond film ends. That is exactly why we took away our bookie’s DVD collection. For this list we froze nine films at the moment the climax begins and asked one question: if you walked up to the betting window right then, what price would you get on Bond?
The bookie knows what the audience knows at that moment and nothing more. No sequels, no franchise track record, no peeking at the poster. The bet is Bond beats the villain and stops the plan. Whether he gets a drink afterward is a separate market. We count down from the shortest price, where Bond is the favorite, to the longest shot on the board.
How to read the odds: each entry gives the British fractional price, the way a high street bookmaker in London would chalk it up. 3/1 means a $1 bet wins $3 plus your dollar back. 1/2 means you risk $2 to win $1. This is all for fun. No money changed hands, and our bookie would like that on the record.
9 to 7: Grandma Could Bet These
9. Kristatos, For Your Eyes Only (1981): 1/2
Bond, Melina and Columbo’s men are standing at the foot of St. Cyril’s, an abandoned monastery on top of a rock pillar. Kristatos is up there with the ATAC, waiting for the KGB to come and collect it. Bond’s side has a smuggler’s private crew and a woman who has already shown what she can do with a crossbow. The catch is the front door: the way up is a basket on a winch, and the winch is at the top. So Bond climbs. The book still makes him the favorite, because he has a capable assault party and the whole plan rests on a handoff that hasn’t happened yet. Gogol’s helicopter arrives just in time to watch the ATAC go over the cliff.
8. Blofeld, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969): 3/1
The avalanche is over, and Tracy is Blofeld’s prisoner at Piz Gloria. M brushes off Bond’s objections to London’s plan for dealing with Blofeld, so Bond goes private. On paper that is ugly: no government, a fortress on a mountaintop and a hostage. Then the bettors notice who Bond is going private with. Draco is the hostage’s father, he runs a crime syndicate, and he has men and helicopters. The book has a lot of respect for an angry father with air support. Tracy gets out, and Blofeld ends the chase stuck in a tree.
7. Safin, No Time to Die (2021): 5/1
Safin has taken Madeleine and Mathilde to his island, an old missile base in the Sea of Japan that he has turned into a nanobot factory. Q hands Bond and Nomi a submersible glider. The plan is to get the hostages out, then call in a missile strike. In Bond’s favor: two double O agents, Q’s kit and the Royal Navy on call. Against him: two hostages and a factory full of a weapon you can’t punch. The book lands on 5/1. Bond stops Safin and the strike goes in, and the people who loved him did not feel like collecting.
6 to 4: Now It’s a Contest
6. Stromberg, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977): 8/1
The supertanker Liparus opens its bow and swallows the American submarine Bond is riding in. Inside the hull are the British and Soviet subs it captured earlier, with their crews locked up, and Stromberg plans to use their missiles to start a nuclear war between the superpowers. Anya is being taken off to Atlantis. Bond is a prisoner inside the villain’s ship, and the missiles are already in the wrong hands. That would be a 50/1 line, except three navies’ worth of angry submariners are locked up a few decks down, and somebody only has to open the door. The book took a lot of money on “somebody.” He frees the crews, and the two stolen subs end up firing at each other.
5. Silva, Skyfall (2012): 10/1
Bond has driven M to Skyfall, his childhood home in the Scottish Highlands, and asked Q to leave an electronic trail for Silva to follow. The armory is grim. Kincade, the gamekeeper, sold the family guns to a collector. What’s left is Bond’s father’s hunting rifle, a hunting knife and a few sticks of dynamite, plus Kincade’s own shotgun. The garrison is Bond, M and Kincade. Silva has already blown up part of MI6 headquarters and walked out of its holding cell. What keeps this line from going longer is that Bond picked the battlefield, knows the house and has time to rig it. Bond kills Silva, but Silva came to kill M, and M dies of a wound from the attack. Under house rules the plan was not stopped, so the book keeps this one.
4. Gustav Graves, Die Another Day (2002): 12/1
Bond and Jinx are running alongside Graves’s giant Antonov cargo plane as it takes off in North Korea, trying to climb into the landing gear. Bond has already worked out that Graves is Colonel Moon with a new face. The plane is the flying control room for Icarus, the satellite that turns sunlight into a weapon, and Graves is about to use it to cut a path through the minefield in the DMZ. Two stowaways against a plane full of soldiers, a traitor named Frost and a weapon in orbit is a long price. Jinx, an NSA agent with a habit of getting into places she shouldn’t, is the reason it is only 12/1. Bond opens Graves’s parachute, and it drags him out of the plane and into an engine.
3 to 1: Long Shots for the Brave
3. Blofeld, You Only Live Twice (1967): 16/1
Bond and Kissy have found it. The lake in the volcano crater is a metal hatch, and SPECTRE’s rocket base is underneath. Kissy goes back for Tanaka. Bond goes in alone. Meanwhile Bird One, the SPECTRE craft that has been stealing spacecraft, is about to launch again, and US forces are preparing a nuclear attack on the USSR over it. Bettors see one man inside a hollow volcano full of guards, with a superpower close to pressing the button. The one thing holding the price down is the ninja army somewhere behind him. He gets the hatch open for them and blows up Bird One before it reaches the American capsule.
2. Dominic Greene, Quantum of Solace (2008): 20/1
Bond and Camille head into the Bolivian desert for the Perla de las Dunas, the hotel where Greene and General Medrano are meeting to finalize their deal. Felix tipped Bond off and warned him the CIA was coming, and Bond got away from the American special forces sent to kill him. MI6 wants him brought in. His friend Mathis has been killed by the Bolivian police. No agency, no backup and an eco-hotel full of the people who want him dead. His side of the ledger is Camille, who wants Medrano even more than Bond wants Greene. Camille settles her score with Medrano, and Bond leaves Greene in the desert.
1. Koskov, The Living Daylights (1987): 33/1
Bond was drugged and flown out as a captive, and now he is locked in the jail of a Soviet air base in Afghanistan. Koskov has betrayed Kara as well, so she is locked up with him. The villain has the base, the guards and the story. Bond has a cell, a cellist and, somewhere in the same jail, a condemned prisoner. Nothing on screen at that moment says this ends well, which is why it gets the longest price on the board. What the book did not price in is the prisoner: he turns out to be Kamran Shah, a leader of the local Mujahideen. They break out together, and Shah’s men later charge the air base on horseback.
Settle Up
Nine tickets, eight winners and one the book kept. Our bookie has asked us to stop helping. Some of those winners came with a cost no bookie can price.