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Well the short answer is : it's an illusion :)
It is in the top 10 of the box offices released in 1969, but it actually made only one week of money in 1969, and then most of its money in 1970 and after, and there it would not have been in the top 10.
This shows one can always twist the figures as one wants.
Also, I'll add one thing : the box office dollars you can see here and there is not the money the producers make back. They see in particular far less money from the international markets, and far less money even at home when time passes. Success at home and frontloading are very important for the studios. It didn't make "box office minus budget" for the producers, far from it.
And well, Michael G. Wilson probably knows what he talks about, why not believe him ? Possibly the shares of the benefits from OHMSS were planned along the previous Connery releases, and it didn't went well with EON ? Imagine the shares went high only above some box office threshold that it never reached, for instance.
PS : With the leak, we have unprecedented access to the business talk within the studios. If I remember correctly (and well, I probably don't), early in the developement, when the budget was around 220M$, according to the studio operatives SPECTRE needed
It's intrinsic quality is entirely irrelevant though.
Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better.
In terms of money I believe OHMSS was not a flop. I can't remember ever hearing anybody speaking of OHMSS as a flop in the various documentaries.
In the end box office and ROI are the deciding factors.
Here is something I have saved on my computer, it is rather interesting to see which movies were the most profitable! As a business analyst such numbers are the ones that are the most interesting to me.
Look at OHMSS and how profitable it was
Return on investment (ROI) measures the gain or loss generated on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage and is typically used for personal financial decisions, to compare a company's profitability or to compare the efficiency of different investments.
The return on investment formula is:
ROI = (Net Profit / Cost of Investment) x 100
To see how hard it is to understand box office from the 1960s, here is the box office first week of OHMSS in the States : as you can see, not in every town, and the figures are not $, but ratio of average earnings...
And yet if you look at the tallies from the "year" Alice's Restaurant is well below OHMSS...
Movies were still making quite some money 5 years after their release, and I'm pretty sure it's added to the "original year box office", even though it's very counterintuitive.
So, well, I believe Michael G. Wilson !
And here's why they called Connery back :
Reminds me of the Justice League movie, although probably in reverse. That movie was artistically a flop but financially a huge hit. Although even by the numbers the studio didn't make the money it hoped.
Back to OHMSS, I think artistically it was a hit. Though I personally think with Connery in the role we'd have a bigger artistic hit on our hands. I think of the poignancy of the resignation scene between M and Bond. After 6 films that would have packed more punch. We might even had been spared the reflections of previous missions moment and instead had Bond just sit and drink in the office. I think the Moneypenny moment at the wedding would have had greater gravitas with Connery.
Back to the Bond podcast I heard someone say that Cubby had postponed OHMSS as a way to save Connery. They knew he was close to burn out and decided to hold the film back. I find that fascinating as it would show a different side to the Connery and EON relationship. They were maybe trying to keep him as Bond and were trying to placate him. I am surprised that they used OHMSS as the launching point for another Bond as the material was far more meaty then DN, or even LALD. This movie required a great deal from the actor playing Bond and to place that pressure on an unknown Aussie was a real gamble that ultimately didn't play off.
It was only surpassed by Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid that year.