You may not have been interested. Don't mistake your personal preferences for everyone else's. "The Living Daylights" was a critical and commercial success, so clearly, most viewers do not share your opinion. The following film, "License to Kill," made back $156.2 million against a production budget of $32 million, so it was a success too. It was not as big a success as other Bond films, but it still made plenty of money. These were not failures at the box office by any honest evaluation.
You are simply wrong on your facts: the films were not failures, and lots of people liked them, and Dalton as Bond.
The reason there was no third Dalton Bond film -- and there was one in the planning stages -- had nothing to do with lack of commercial success, or viewers not liking Dalton's take on the character. After "License to Kill," changes in the ownership of MGM, legal wrangles over Bondβs international distribution, and the potential sale of Danjaq led to a six-year hiatus for Bond film franchise -- the longest pre-pandemic. By the time the dust settled, Dalton wasn't interested in playing Bond anymore, and Eon productions wanted to go in a different direction after such a long hiatus.
I for one am sorry we never got to see more of Dalton as Bond, and so are lots of other people. Audiences may not have been ready for such a radical shift in the character of 007 so soon after the lighter-toned Moore era, but the idea of harder-edged Bond, who sometimes disobeyed orders, appeared to hate his job and be getting burned out on it worked absolutely fine when Daniel Craig played it exactly the same way, so don't tell me that "no one was interested in seeing the 'literary version,'" because that is manifestly not the case. If it were, "Casino Royale," which was the most faithful adaptation of a Fleming novel in decades, and Craig's Bond, again, a very faithful adaptation of the literary one, wouldn't have taken off like a rocket, as it did.
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FootOfDavros (6769)
a year ago
You may not have been interested. Don't mistake your personal preferences for everyone else's.
I didn't - hence why I said "relative failure".
These were not failures at the box office by any honest evaluation.
It's a very honest evaluation to compare them against other films in the series. And that being said, whatever way you want to dress it up cannot avoid the fact that the two Dalton films are rank bottom (LTK) and close to rank bottom in terms of box office draw for the entire series.
That's nothing to do with me, my personal preferences or getting my "facts" wrong, that's simply how they were received in cinemas at the time.
Enjoy them all you like (tbh I myself softened to them a bit on a recent rewatch) but no amount of post Craig revisionism will change how these were really received at the time.
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