OO7's Lost Missions: 6 James Bond movies they planned but never made

1. CASINO ROYALE - DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO

For many years, Bond fans could only dream of a bona-fide big-screen adaptation of Casino Royale, with Eon Productions (producers of the official film series) only securing the rights to Ian Fleming's first 007 novel in 1999.

The final film, starring Daniel Craig, would finally hit cinemas in 2006. But two years prior, while Pierce Brosnan still held the Bond mantle, none other than Quentin Tarantino was talking up his desire to make Casino Royale.

"I've always wanted to do it," he enthused in May 2004. "I bumped into Pierce Brosnan and we talked about it. He liked the idea."

Tarantino's version, like the Craig adaptation, was planned as a fairly faithful adaptation of Fleming's book - though presumably without the whole 'rookie 007' angle.

Tabloid rumours even linked frequent Quentin collaborator Uma Thurman to the part of Bond's tragic love Vesper Lynd, but when Pierce officially exited the franchise in October 2004, Tarantino lost interest.

"I would have liked to do Casino Royale with Pierce Brosnan," he said a few months later. "But once I heard Brosnan isn't going to be doing any more Bond films, that killed it as far as I was concerned."

2. ONCE UPON A SPY

Craig has a 'lost' Bond film all his own, though: Once Upon A Spy was the name of a treatment penned by Oscar winner Peter Morgan, currently winning rave reviews for his Netflix series The Crown.

Leaked plot details make it sound like a much more bleak version of 2012's Skyfall, with both films killing off M (Judi Dench) at their climax.

Here, though, it's Bond himself who's forced to kill his boss, after she's caught up in a complex blackmail plot orchestrated by her own illegitimate son - the product of an affair with a KGB agent during the Cold War.

Robert Wade (who, with Neal Purvis, has co-written every 007 film since 1999's The World Is Not Enough) didn't hold back in his criticism of Morgan's rather grim pitch.

"We always found that really, really difficult to make credible or satisfying," he said in 2015 book Some King of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films. "It was very dark and frankly I don't think it really worked."

3. THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

Timothy Dalton's edgier Bond was arguably ahead of his time, but lasted just two films in the late '80s - though a third was planned.

The big idea was to release another 007 outing in 1991, with the rumoured title The Property of a Lady, after one of Fleming's short stories.

But a legal tussle between MGM and Danjaq (owner of the Bond film rights) held up production until 1994, by which time Dalton had decided to bow out.

The planned film would've seen Bond deployed to the Far East in the wake of a terrorist attack on a Scottish nuclear facility, to investigate the corrupt businessman Sir Henry Lee Ching.

Crossing paths with the Chinese Secret Service, our suave super-spy teams up with jewel smuggler Connie Webb to expose Ching's shady past and halt a plot that could spark World War Three.

We'd also have met Denholm Crisp - a retired spy and old mentor to Bond who's ultimately unmasked as a villain (with Anthony Hopkins being linked to the part).

Heavily rewritten, The Property of a Lady would eventually morph into Brosnan's 1995 debut Goldeneye - with the opening sequence relocated from Scotland to Russia, and Crisp changed from 007's mentor to his old partner Alec Trevelyan, 006.

4. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER - STARRING GEORGE LAZENBY

Lazenby's stint as Bond was even shorter than Dalton's - he appeared in just one outing, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service (or, 'The One where Bond's wife is tragically killed').

The original plan for a follow-up was an adaptation of Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever that would see Bond on a mission of vengeance, still mourning his murdered wife and hunting her killer Irma Bunt (Ilse Steppat).

But when George opted to walk away from the series, plans for a direct sequel to OHMSS were dropped and producers spent a pretty penny to rehire Sean Connery for a rewritten, much lighter version of Diamonds.

We very much doubt the original draft, by veteran 007 screenwriter Richard Maibaum, featured that scene of Blofeld in drag. Though you never know...

5. WARHEAD

Bit of a complicated one, this. But here's the short version...

In the 1950s, Fleming collaborated with writer / producer Kevin McClory on a pitch for a James Bond television series. When the show didn't happen, Fleming used the material as the basis for his next 007 novel, Thunderball.

This understandably irked McClory, who sued Fleming and won the film rights to the book. So when Eon Productions adapted Thunderball as a movie in 1965, they had to strike a deal with Kev.

But he retained the film rights and later used them to make a second movie based on Thunderball: 1983's Never Say Never Again.

This much is pretty widely known, but McClory wasn't done yet and later attempted to recycle the material again from the late '80s onwards...

His third film inspired by Thunderball was variously known as Warhead, Atomic Warfare and Warhead 2000, with actors eyed to play 007 including Pierce Brosnan (in 1989 - before his official Bond stint began), Timothy Dalton (in the late '90s - after his tenure was over) and Liam Neeson (again, in the '90s - long before Taken reestablished the Oscar winner as an action star).

But after much legal wrangling, McClory and Sony settled out of court with MGM / United Artists in 1999, giving up all rights to make a James Bond film and defusing Warhead once and for all.

6. HITCHCOCK, ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Back when Fleming was first developing the idea that would become Thunderball, he approached none other than Mr. Hitchcock to helm a screen adaptation of 007.

He sent a telegram pitching the project in 1959, but there's no record on whether or not Hitchcock ever read it or responded to Fleming.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Hitchcock's most recent film outing at the time was North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant - who, legend has it, would later turn down the part of Bond in Dr. No.

(The film's villain, James Mason, was also eyed for Bond in the late '50s - for a proposed TV adaptation of From Russia, With Love that never came to fruition.)

The entire Bond legend as we know it would've unfolded very differently if Hitchcock had signed up. Instead, he made a little-seen horror film called Psycho and was never heard from again...

They all sound interesting. Particularly Property Of A Lady.

To me DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER as a continuation of what Peter Hunt and Richard Maibaum started would be of most interest. What a road to take.

I'm motivated by my Duty.