But it lied. The next Bond movie was not For Your Eyes Only—it was Moonraker.
Why?
What could possibly have happened to cause the producers of the most successful film franchise in history to scrap the scheduled release of their next guaranteed blockbuster? Especially since they weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel, just swapping one paint-by-numbers Bond script for another.
And why Moonraker, of all things?
Ian Fleming’s Moonraker was one of the least memorable Bond stories, a bland blend of Space Race anxiety and Cold War paranoia, centering around the rather quaint superweapon du jour: a hijacked nuclear missile. Yawn.
The best thing about it was the vaguely sinister name of its villain, Hugo Drax.
Nuclear terrorism was old news for the Bond series; in fact, it was pretty much the standard plot device going all the way back to the first film, Dr. No. So what happened that caused Moonraker to be rushed into production?
A little film called Star Wars.
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