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Not stirred: This lineup at the Madame Tussauds wax museum in Berlin presents all the actors who've played James Bond in the legendary Eon Productions movies. From left: Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Daniel Craig, Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Pierce Brosnan.
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The movies are a force to be reckoned with, with 26 films to date (24 canonical, plus two rogues). Over the course of six decades, the Bond franchise has delivered both gems and clunkers. It'll be a little while longer before we see how the next , , stacks up against all the others. That film, likely the final one to star as 007, has been pushed back more than once by concerns, and now it's scheduled to .
While you're waiting for No Time to Die -- whose theme song has already -- you can satisfy your by revisiting the , from 's debut in in 1962 all the way to Craig's most recent outing, . It'll be a fun look back, seeing how Eon Productions made the superspy an emblem of the times, an avatar of style and a , with six different actors taking their turn as Bond.
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And here's the latest plot twist for the long-running Bond franchise: On Wednesday, tech titan , the venerable Hollywood studio that oversees the 007 movies.
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If you don't know where to start with the Bond movies, be sure to check out our .
Or you can also take a run through the movie rankings below, from worst to best. It's based on an , specific to when the movies came out, as compiled by CNET sister site Metacritic. The list accounts for every theatrical release, not just the two dozen from Eon Productions but also two noncanonical entries -- the 1967 version of Casino Royale, a trippy turn with multiple actors playing Bond (David Niven chief among them), and 1983's Never Say Never Again, with Connery in his second comeback.
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Don't go looking for the 1954 version of Casino Royale, though. That was a total outlier -- a 50-minute TV playhouse production that introduced Ian Fleming's hero to the world as "Jimmy" Bond, an American secret agent. You can find that on YouTube, if you're curious. (Also for your consideration: James Bond , and the .)
Otherwise, we've got the whole litany of actors who've played Bond in the official franchise -- besides Connery and Craig, that's , , Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.
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