Strip out the murder, the henchmen and the doomsday device, and a surprising number of Bond villains turn out to be one compliance meeting away from a perfectly dull company. Most of them already had the business. The scheme was a shortcut.
We judge the scheme as the film shows it. Every villain here would also have to stop killing people, but that goes without saying, so it doesn’t count against anybody. The ranking is how much of the plan survives once you take the crimes out, from “start over” at #10 to “basically filing quarterly reports already” at #1. And this is a joke list about fictional people, not legal advice. If you are planning to hollow out a volcano, talk to a real lawyer first.
10 to 8: Needs a Full Rebrand
10. Blofeld: Brainwash Allergy Patients, Demand a Noble Title, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
On paper, Piz Gloria is an allergy research institute on a Swiss mountaintop, and its young patients seem to be getting better. Behind the brochure, Blofeld is brainwashing them to carry Virus Omega home and wreck the world’s food supply unless his demands are met. The demands are the best part: amnesty for his past crimes, and official recognition as Count Balthazar de Bleuchamp. He had already been writing to the College of Arms in London to claim the title, which is the most by-the-book item on his résumé. Lose the virus and there isn’t much left. The clinic was only ever the cover story, so what survives is a man on a mountain who is very into genealogy.
Cut: the virus, the brainwashing, the threat to the world’s farms.
Keep: the mountain and the paperwork for the title.
Today it’s: a family-history service with a very nice view.
9. Kananga: Give Away Heroin, Then Raise the Price, Live and Let Die (1973)
Kananga rules the island of San Monique, and in America, as Mr. Big, he runs a chain of Fillet of Soul restaurants. The plan: grow heroin in poppy fields hidden on San Monique, hand it out free through the restaurants, bankrupt the rival dealers, then raise prices on all the new customers he created. As a pricing strategy it is textbook. Give it away, lock them in, send the bill later. The product is the crime, so the plan itself doesn’t survive. The business around it does. Swap the heroin for the house hot sauce and he has a restaurant with a loyalty program.
Cut: the product, the hidden fields, the voodoo scare campaign that kept the locals away from them.
Keep: the restaurant chain and the pricing model.
Today it’s: a subscription service with a very generous free trial.
8. Zorin: Flood Silicon Valley to Corner the Chip Market, A View to a Kill (1985)
Zorin already had the business. Zorin Industries is a government contractor that makes microchips, including a design built to survive the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear blast. His problem was competition. His fix, Main Strike, was to set off explosives under the lakes along the Hayward and San Andreas faults, flood Silicon Valley, and walk away with a monopoly on microchips. He pitched it to a room full of investors, which takes nerve. On the side, his racehorses were winning with help from implanted microchips that triggered steroid doses during the race. Most chipmakers try to beat the competition with a faster chip.
Cut: flooding the competition, doping the horses.
Keep: the chip company, the government contracts, the horses (raced clean).
Today it’s: a semiconductor company with a very aggressive five-year plan.
7 to 5: Drop the Doomsday Feature
7. Stromberg: Start a Nuclear War, Move Under the Sea, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Stromberg is a shipping magnate who also owns a chain of laboratories and loves the sea more than he loves people. That is a respectable résumé. The plan is to fire nuclear missiles from captured submarines at Moscow and New York, start a global nuclear war, and then build a new civilization under the sea. Take out the war and what’s left is a rich man who wants to live underwater and thinks other people might like to join him. That isn’t a scheme. It’s a waitlist.
Cut: the captured submarines, the missiles, the end of the world.
Keep: the shipping line, the labs, the underwater dream.
Today it’s: an ocean-living startup with a long waitlist and a great brochure.
6. Carver: Start a War to Win Broadcast Rights, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Carver is a media baron whose news outlets kept reporting the crisis hours before MI6 knew it was happening. Great scoop record, until you ask how. He was making the news himself, staging attacks to start a war between Britain and China. The payoff was a deal with a corrupt Chinese general, Chang, who would take power and give Carver exclusive broadcasting rights in China for the next century. Wanting your network seen everywhere is ordinary media mogul ambition. He would just have to cover the news instead of manufacturing it, and get those rights the boring way, with a lot of meetings.
Cut: the staged attacks, the war, the general’s coup.
Keep: the network, the satellites, the ambition.
Today it’s: a 24-hour news channel with a very big expansion plan.
5. Graves: Launder Diamonds, Aim a Space Mirror at a Minefield, Die Another Day (2002)
Graves’s public story is that he is a British billionaire who struck a diamond vein in Iceland and spent the fortune on Icarus, an orbital mirror that focuses sunlight to give farms year-round sunshine. That pitch could go straight into an investor deck. The real story is that the Iceland mine is a front for laundering African conflict diamonds, Icarus is meant to burn a path through the minefield in the Korean DMZ for an invasion, and Graves is Colonel Moon with a new face courtesy of gene therapy. Buy the diamonds from a real mine and point the mirror at crops, and suddenly the investor deck is true.
Cut: the conflict diamonds, the fake mine, the invasion.
Keep: Icarus as advertised, the billionaire adventurer persona.
Today it’s: a green energy satellite company with a very photogenic founder.
4 to 2: One Crime Away from Respectable
4. Le Chiffre: Short an Aerospace Stock, Then Bomb the Prototype, Casino Royale (2006)
Le Chiffre is a private banker whose clients include terrorists, so the client list already needs work. His big play was to bet against Skyfleet, an aerospace company about to unveil a new prototype airliner, by shorting its stock with money a client had trusted him to invest. Betting that a stock will fall is a normal day’s work for plenty of traders. Arranging a bomb at Miami’s airport to make sure it falls is the part that turns a trade into a plot. Take on honest clients, let the airliner fly, and he is a hedge fund manager with an inhaler and strong opinions about aviation stocks.
Cut: the bomb, the terrorist clients.
Keep: the short position, the poker face.
Today it’s: a hedge fund that is very confident about one particular trade.
3. Greene: Back a Coup to Control a Country’s Water, Quantum of Solace (2008)
Greene runs Greene Planet, an environmental organization that buys up land in the name of preserving it. In Bolivia he backs an exiled general, Medrano, in a coup, and in return gets a stretch of desert that looks worthless. It isn’t. Greene’s people have been damming the country’s underground water, and the contract he puts in front of Medrano makes Greene the new government’s water provider. Take out the coup and the hidden dams, and you have an eco-branded company bidding to run a country’s water service, which is an actual line of work with actual competitors.
Cut: the coup, the secret dams.
Keep: the eco branding, the land deal, the utility contract.
Today it’s: a water utility with a lovely logo.
2. Elektra King: Melt Down a Reactor to Wipe Out the Rival Pipelines, The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Elektra runs her family’s oil business and is building a pipeline from the Caspian region toward Turkey, routed around Istanbul. Her plan with Renard was to put stolen plutonium into a nuclear submarine’s reactor in Istanbul’s waters and cause a meltdown, wiping out the city along with the rival pipelines through the Bosphorus. With the competition gone, her pipeline becomes the route that matters. Remove the meltdown and the pipeline is the whole business. Building a better route than your rivals is called competition. Erasing the city they run through is not.
Cut: the plutonium, the submarine, the meltdown.
Keep: the pipeline, the route around Istanbul.
Today it’s: an energy infrastructure company with a sharp-elbowed route map.
Basically Already Filing Taxes
1. Scaramanga: Steal a Solar Breakthrough and Auction It Off, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Set the gun work aside and Scaramanga’s plan is a tech sale. He ends up owning a working solar power plant built around the Solex Agitator, the key component in a system for turning sunlight into usable power, in the middle of an energy crisis. He took the plant by killing its previous owner, the industrialist Hai Fat, and the Solex itself was lifted off the body of Gibson, the scientist who invented it. The house rule sets the killings aside. What’s left is a man holding the energy breakthrough of the decade with a plan to sell it to the highest bidder. That is a tech auction. Get the Solex through the front door with a signed contract and a business magazine puts him on the cover.
Cut: how he got the Solex.
Keep: the plant, the technology, the auction.
Today it’s: a clean energy startup with one product and a long line of buyers.
The Compliance Report
Ten schemes, and the pattern is hard to miss. Most of these villains had a real business before they had a doomsday plan. Carver had a network. Zorin had a factory. Greene had a logo. Scaramanga had the one product everybody wanted in an energy crisis. The crime was the shortcut, and the shortcut is what brought Bond to the door.