Bond, ranked and mildly unhinged
The James Bond world, run through ordinary life. Henchmen review Blofeld, Stromberg and Octopussy as employers. Villain schemes face plain business questions. The Fort Knox gold Goldfinger planned to contaminate and Scaramanga’s fee get converted into today’s money. Fictional lairs like Blofeld’s volcano go up for sale as real estate listings, and the real filming locations behind them get a travel guide.
Moneypenny has sat outside M’s office since 1962, which means every bill James Bond sends home crosses her desk first. Most are easy. A car was destroyed, the car was expensive, here is the paperwork. Some of them are not easy at all. So we pulled eight invoices from the pile and ranked them by … Read more
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 … Read more
Bond villains are some of the biggest employers in fiction. They run shipping lines, chip factories, media empires and at least one circus, and every one of them needs staff: guards, pilots, scientists, assistants, a man to hold the cat. Plenty of people now rate their old bosses on anonymous employee review sites. Henchmen, for … Read more
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 … Read more
Bond villains love a number. A billion here, a hundred million there, a fee paid in gold. The trouble is that most of these numbers were announced decades ago, which makes them sound smaller every year. So we ran them through the inflation calculator to find out what each villain was really asking for in … Read more
Bond villain lairs usually end up as burning sets, shattered miniatures or very expensive effects shots. A few are real James Bond film locations, and you can buy a ticket to them. We ranked nine by how good a trip they are for a Bond fan: how close you get to what was on screen, … Read more
Every Bond villain has the same real estate problem. They spend a fortune on a secret lair with a monorail, a shark tank and a dramatic view, and then a man in a dinner jacket shows up and it all explodes. That leaves a lot of Bond villain lairs on the market. So we listed … Read more