Sean Connery’s Lost Bond: The Unmade 007 Film That Never Was
Actors occasionally dabble in writing, but few would have expected Sean Connery—whose career was built on his indelible presence as James Bond—to try his hand at crafting a 007 screenplay. And yet, at one peculiar juncture, the original Bond himself found himself putting pen to paper, with his own license to write a new cinematic adventure for the world’s most famous spy.
This wasn’t a case of an idle vanity project, nor was it a natural extension of his tenure in the tuxedo. Instead, Connery’s foray into screenwriting came in an altogether more contentious scenario, one wrapped up in the legal knots of rights disputes and bitter rivalries.
The result? Warhead, an ill-fated Bond project that was somehow both wildly ambitious and utterly ridiculous.
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The Thunderball Connection
The origins of Warhead stem from the long-standing battle over Thunderball, the 1965 Bond outing that had been co-written by Kevin McClory, who later claimed partial ownership of the Bond cinematic formula.
By the 1970s, with enough time passed to sidestep litigation, McClory sought to make his own Bond film outside the clutches of Eon Productions. He enlisted writer Len Deighton—renowned for penning The Ipcress File—and none other than Connery himself to help bring his vision to life.
The concept was, on paper at least, a reinvention of Thunderball with a grander scale, updated espionage tropes, and a distinct lack of involvement from Cubby Broccoli’s camp. What it also had was a surplus of outlandishness.
Gone were the restrained, Cold War-infused tensions of Ian Fleming’s original material. In their place: robotic sharks, nuclear threats lurking beneath Manhattan, and an excess of tongue-in-cheek absurdity.
Bond vs. The Mechanical Sharks
Had Warhead seen the light of day in its originally intended form, it might have been more akin to Austin Powers than From Russia with Love. One particularly infamous detail involved Bond wrestling robotic sharks in the New York City sewer system to thwart a nuclear detonation.
As if that wasn’t enough, Connery’s take on 007 would have also found himself paragliding onto the head of the Statue of Liberty for a climactic showdown against Spectre’s disposable henchmen.
Perhaps most intriguingly, some elements of Warhead seemed to eerily manifest elsewhere. Roger Moore’s The Spy Who Loved Me featured an underwater lair suspiciously similar to one described in McClory’s script. Likewise, the escape pod sequence that closed the film bore an uncanny resemblance to an idea proposed in Connery’s iteration.
Unlicensed To Write
Ultimately, Warhead fell apart. Connery distanced himself, Paramount lost interest, and the whole endeavour was quietly shelved. When McClory did get his Bond film made, it arrived as 1983’s Never Say Never Again—a more measured, legally permissible remake of Thunderball with Connery’s wryly self-aware return to the role.
And so Warhead remains one of the great Bond what-ifs, a relic of an alternate timeline where 007 battled cybernetic sea creatures in the Big Apple. Let’s just say it’s for the best that it never happened, because one suspects that Mike Myers would have had a field day with it.
