You Only Live Twice - 1967

You Only Live Twice is a 1967 spy film and the fifth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, starring Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. It is the first of three Bond films to be directed by Lewis Gilbert. The screenplay of You Only Live Twice was written by Roald Dahl, and loosely based on Ian Fleming's 1964 novel of the same name. It is the first James Bond film to discard most of Fleming's plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story.

In the film, Bond is dispatched to Japan after American and Soviet-crewed spacecraft vanish mysteriously in orbit, each nation blaming the other amidst the Cold War. Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island to find the perpetrators, and comes face-to-face with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. The film reveals the appearance of Blofeld, who was previously unseen. SPECTRE is working for the government of an unnamed Asian power, implied to be China, to provoke war between the superpowers.[4][5]

During the filming in Japan, it was announced that Sean Connery would leave the role of Bond, but after one film's absence, he returned in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever and later in 1983's non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again. You Only Live Twice received positive reviews and grossed over $111 million (equivalent to $1 billion in 2024) in worldwide box office. However, it was the first Bond film to see a decline in box-office revenue, primarily owing to the oversaturation of the spy film genre from Bond imitators, including a competing Bond film, Casino Royale, from Columbia Pictures (1967). The Bond series continued with On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1969, the first film without Sean Connery in the lead role.

American NASA spacecraft Jupiter 16 is hijacked from orbit by an unidentified spaceship. The United States suspects the Soviet Union, but the British suspect Japanese involvement since the spacecraft landed in the Sea of Japan. To investigate, MI6 operative James Bond is sent to Tokyo, after faking his own death in Hong Kong and being buried at sea from HMS Tenby.

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