James Bond was among Disney’s targets, alongside Marvel and Star Wars. Fortunately, it never happened.
It’s almost hard to imagine today, but there was a time when Disney represented “only” Disney to the masses. This was before the studio bought Pixar in 2006 (for $7.4 billion), Marvel Entertainment in 2009 (for $4 billion), Lucasfilm in 2012 (for $4.05 billion) and 20th Century Fox in 2019 (for $71.3 billion), to speak of the most iconic.
Thus the sprawling Disney empire could integrate Toy Story, Avengers, Star Wars, Avatar, Planet of the Apes, Alien, Predator and dozens of other beloved universes and characters. And that’s how the studio has reigned over Hollywood for years, with the 2019 frenzy at its peak ( Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King, Frozen 2, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Captain Marvel, Star Wars 9, Toy Story 4, Aladdin ). But in a parallel universe, Disney could have also run the James Bond franchise, as the former studio head explained.
DISNEY’S VOID
It was, of course, in a publication called the Financial Times that Bob Iger opened up. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, you should read Ecran Large more often: he was the CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 2005 to 2020, and it was him who was urgently recalled in 2022 to steady the ship, replacing his successor Bob Chapek, who was ousted. The contract was supposed to last two years but he stayed until 2026, when he left Disney again for good this time, and was replaced by Josh D’Amaro.
In other words: Bob Iger is one of the great architects of the Disney we know today. He spent around $90 billion to grow the catalog, and revenues tripled during his reign according to Financial Times. And the article rightly notes that before him, Disney was in rough shape, to such an extent that the telecommunications company Comcast tried in 2004 to buy them for $54 million. A move and a sum that now seem ridiculous.
As Steven Spielberg, cited in the article, put it in a sharp summary: Disney was “a place you went only if you were making a family-friendly film or if you wanted to avoid the Disneyland lines.”
BOND COURAGE
And that is where James Bond comes into play, quickly landing on Bob Iger and his team’s list of dream acquisitions, the success with Pixar giving them wings:
“For Disney, according to Bob Iger, ‘It was as if the clouds parted and the sun started to shine again.’ At the time, Josh D’Amaro was still a young executive: ‘We felt like nothing could stop us.’
With that momentum, Iger set out to seek new acquisitions. ‘We drew up a list of potential targets. Marvel was on it, Star Wars as well, and James Bond too. We had that list, and I told myself: check them off one by one and buy them all.’ Only James Bond— now under Amazon’s control—slipped away.
In 2022, the year Bob Iger was summoned to help Disney take charge again, the war machine Amazon purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for $8.5 billion, thereby gaining the James Bond saga. In 2025, Amazon MGM Studios spent an additional $1 billion to take total control of the brand, ousting producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the children of longtime 007 producer Albert R. Broccoli. A page turned for good.
No one can know what Disney would have been willing to pay to get James Bond back, but it’s hard to imagine a world where it would have been as much as Amazon, which ultimately spent about $9.5 billion in this massive deal.
Further in the article, Bob Iger talks about another deal that didn’t close: Twitter, which he wanted to buy “at a very attractive price” from Jack Dorsey, to turn the social network into a “worldwide platform for Disney.” He changed his mind on the day of signing, thinking that adding Twitter to their business would be “a terrible source of distraction.” Internally, they had also contemplated acquiring Apple, but that didn’t go very far.
So we’ve escaped a world where Disney would also be behind James Bond, your phone and/or your computer, and a once-popular social network. Still, given where they are now, you can judge who was the plague and the cholera in this story.
