Austin Powers is a British spy from 1967 who was frozen, thawed out in the 1990s and sent back to work against Dr. Evil. His films are a spoof of the Bond series, and the people who made them did their homework. Dr. Evil’s creator has said the character was based on Blofeld as he appears in You Only Live Twice. Dr. Evil’s henchman Random Task is a send-up of Oddjob. The third film’s villain, Goldmember, takes his name from Goldfinger.
So we asked the obvious question in reverse. If you took Austin and dropped him into a real Bond film in place of 007, how much would you have to change? The ranking criterion is how little: the less the film needs rewriting for Austin to fit in, the higher it ranks. That means the films that were already halfway to a spoof finish on top. Each entry also names the one scene Austin would struggle with, because that’s what keeps a film from ranking higher. If two films are equally easy, the older film ranks higher, because Austin is a 1960s man and would feel more at home. That tiebreak puts Live and Let Die ahead of A View to a Kill.
This isn’t every Bond film. It’s twelve we picked, including two at the bottom that show what a film Austin can’t enter looks like.
These are all real scenes from the released films. What Austin would do with them is our invention. Characters, not actors, as always. Spoilers throughout.
12 and 11: Austin Would Ask for a Rewrite
12. Casino Royale (2006)
This is the film where Bond earns his double-0 status, gets hurt, falls properly in love and comes out the other side colder than he went in. The big set piece is a high-stakes poker game played over several sessions, and the tension is in faces across a table. There’s no Q and no villain’s lair to tour. Austin could manage the dinner jacket. He would not manage the rest.
What Austin changes: he folds on the first hand and asks where the gadget man is.
11. Licence to Kill (1989)
Bond goes rogue to take revenge on a drug lord after what happens to Felix and his new wife, and M takes away his licence to kill for it. It’s one of the series’ darkest and most personal stories, and the humor is mostly left to Q, who turns up to help Bond on his own time. Austin would have to sit this one out. The film doesn’t want a joke where its anger is.
What Austin changes: the whole tone, which is the whole point of the film.
10 to 7: A Few Scenes Need Reshooting
10. Goldfinger (1964)
Goldfinger is one of the films the spoof borrowed from most, and one of the hardest to break. It opens with Bond swimming up to a target with a fake seagull on his head, then peeling off his wetsuit to reveal a pressed white dinner jacket underneath. That scene could go straight into an Austin Powers film. So could Oddjob, which is why Random Task exists. The menace still plays straight. Goldfinger is frightening because Bond takes him seriously, and Austin can’t take anyone seriously.
What Austin changes: the seagull stays. The straight face goes.
9. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The opening alone is an Austin Powers scene: Bond skis off a cliff, drops his skis and opens a parachute printed with the Union Jack. Later his Lotus ends up in the sea, turns into a submarine, and comes back out onto a beach, where a man with a glass of wine is left to make sense of it. The film also gave the spoof its second title, The Spy Who Shagged Me. It ranks this low because the middle of the film is a fairly serious spy story about two agents on opposite sides learning to trust each other.
What Austin changes: the parachute needs no edits. The Cold War romance needs a lot.
8. Die Another Day (2002)
Q issues Bond an Aston Martin with active camouflage, which makes it invisible. Later Bond surfs a wave set off by the villain’s orbital mirror, in a scene built almost entirely in a computer. The villain himself is a North Korean colonel remade as a British billionaire through gene therapy. Austin would ask Q whether the invisible car comes in a convertible. What holds the film back is the first act, where Bond is captured and held prisoner in North Korea before the film loosens up.
What Austin changes: cut the prison scenes, keep the invisible car.
7. A View to a Kill (1985)
The opening chase has Bond escaping on a snowboard while a cover of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” plays. Later he and Stacey flee the police in a San Francisco fire engine, and the climax has Bond hanging from the mooring rope of the villain’s airship before tying it to the Golden Gate Bridge. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes called the film “Absurd even by Bond standards.” It’s level with Live and Let Die on how little would change, and the older film gets the higher spot.
What Austin changes: swap the surf-rock cover for something groovier. Keep the airship.
6 to 2: Nobody Would Notice
6. Live and Let Die (1973)
A double-decker bus loses its top deck under a low bridge. A speedboat jumps a road in the Louisiana bayou, and another lands on a patrol car. That car belongs to Sheriff J.W. Pepper, who spends the chase spitting tobacco, shouting, and finally asking Bond whether he’s “some kinda doomsday machine, boy?” The film ends with the voodoo villain Baron Samedi laughing on the front of the train Bond is riding. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the series had never seemed more like a real cartoon. The one stretch Austin would struggle with is the voodoo menace on San Monique, which the film plays for genuine dread.
What Austin changes: he gets out of the boat, shakes Pepper’s hand and asks for directions to Harlem.
5. Octopussy (1983)
Bond lets out a Tarzan yell during a jungle chase. He disguises himself in a gorilla suit and, later, as a circus clown. He spies on a floating palace from a submarine built to look like a crocodile, with jaws he can open and close from inside. Film writer Danny Peary complained that the Tarzan cry and the disguises demeaned Bond. For Austin, they would be the job description. The catch is that the clown suit comes during a race to stop a nuclear bomb hidden in a circus, and the film plays that race completely straight. Austin would need to keep a straight face in full makeup, which is a lot to ask.
What Austin changes: he keeps the gorilla suit for the after-party.
4. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
The villain’s one known distinguishing feature is a third nipple, and Bond wears a fake one to impersonate him. In the car chase, Bond grabs a car off a showroom floor with Sheriff Pepper, on holiday in Thailand, already sitting in the passenger seat. Then Bond does a full corkscrew jump over a broken bridge, and the score adds a slide whistle over it. The film’s own composer added that whistle. Austin would have asked for two.
What Austin changes: he compares nipples with the villain, which is the one scene the film didn’t think of. Scaramanga himself is the obstacle, played as a genuinely dangerous man, but the film keeps undercutting him with its own jokes.
3. You Only Live Twice (1967)
This is the film Austin’s world was built from. Dr. Evil is modeled on this film’s Blofeld, the one who runs SPECTRE from a base hidden inside a volcano, white cat and all. Bond is pronounced dead in Hong Kong before the title sequence, then gets a full burial at sea, which turns out to be part of the plan. Later Q flies in with a fold-up armed autogyro called Little Nellie. The film also has a villain’s rocket that swallows other spacecraft whole. Austin wouldn’t be parodying this movie. He’d be home. It stops at #3 because Bond himself plays most of it straight while the film gets bigger around him. In the top two, the silliness reaches Bond.
What Austin changes: he asks why Dr. Evil looks like the guy in the volcano.
2. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Bond escapes a Las Vegas research lab in a moon buggy, chased across a fake lunar set where astronauts are rehearsing in slow motion. Blofeld turns up in drag, carrying his cat. The villain’s henchmen, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, talk like a polite double act while they try to cremate Bond. When Bond tracks down the captive billionaire Willard Whyte, the two women guarding him, Bambi and Thumper, take Bond on in acrobatic combat, and the fight ends with everyone in a swimming pool. Critic Jay Cocks called it the broadest Bond film, “which is to say wackiest.” The opening hunt for Blofeld is close to the only stretch played straight, and it’s over before the credits. Almost every scene after that is already a sketch.
What Austin changes: he wears a better outfit than Blofeld in the drag scene.
Already an Austin Powers Movie
1. Moonraker (1979)
Bond drives a gondola out of a Venice canal, turns it into a hovercraft and crosses St. Mark’s Square while a polka plays. He opens a security door by playing the five-note alien tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He turns up on horseback in gaucho clothing, to the theme from The Magnificent Seven. The steel-toothed henchman Jaws meets a woman named Dolly, the two fall in love, and the score plays Romeo and Juliet. Then the whole thing goes into orbit, with US Marines fighting a laser battle against a villain who wants to repopulate Earth with his own master race. It even ends on Q making a joke about re-entry.
Entertainment Weekly called it “by far the campiest of all 007 movies.” Here’s why it beats You Only Live Twice, which gave Austin his villain. That film is where Dr. Evil came from. Moonraker is where Bond himself already behaves like Austin: borrowing other films’ music, taking a gondola sightseeing and heading to space. There’s no straight stretch for Austin to trip over. We mean all of that as the highest compliment. It’s also our favorite.
What Austin changes: the name on the poster.
The Verdict
The Bond films that rank highest here aren’t the worst ones. They’re the ones with the fewest scenes that ask Bond to be serious, which is exactly what Austin can’t do. Austin Powers works as a spoof because those films had already done half the joke themselves.