It’s almost certain that Enter the Dragon, clearly modeled on Lewis Gilbert’s trendsetting You Only Live Twice, might have launched a multi-film, star-driven franchise right when the EON series, then nearly the only game in town, was suffering from post-Connery growing pains. Sure, the $90 million global total was on the lower end of the 007 movies, but even a much bigger-budgeted sequel could afford to earn less the second time around. That said, a direct follow-up released two-to-three years later could have easily been an old-school breakout sequel and launched an equal-to-Bond (R-rating notwithstanding) action series. Absent the cruel hand of fate, Enter the Dragon would have likely still been a global smash and spawned a few equally successful (or even bigger) sequels, big-scale globe-trotting actioners that would have gone toe-to-toe with the 1970’s and 1980’s 007 movies. The much-liked, Lewis Gilbert-directed The Spy Who Loved Me reasserted the franchise in 1977 with $185 million.
Roger Moore’s (Blaxploitation-centric) Live and Let Die grossed a strong $161 million in 1973, but Moore’s (martial arts-flavored) The Man with the Golden Gun earned just $97 million in 1974.
George Lazenby’s now-beloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service earned “just” $82 million in 1969, while Sean Connery’s aggressively campy return in Diamonds Are Forever made $115 million in 1971. That $90 million initial global cume put it on par with the several surrounding 007 movies of the era. kung-fu flick has earned, following decades of reissues, $350 million worldwide, above every pre- GoldenEye James Bond movie. Robert Clouse’s martial-arts action flick grossed $90 million worldwide in 1973 on an $850,000 budget. It was also a “rip-off/don’t remake” triumph, appropriating the Bond formula (Lee goes to a villain’s fantastical island hide-out and destroys his heroin smuggling operations from within) and hitting pay dirt. But Enter the Dragon itself, which catapulted Lee into mainstream global stardom just after he died at the age of 32, wasn’t just a groundbreaking Hollywood martial arts action movie starring Lee, character actor/martial artist John Saxon and Blaxploitation star Jim Kelly.
I wrote last month about Mortal Kombat being a fine example of “rip-off/don’t remake” and successfully making a kid-friendly flick by approximating the core plot of a grown-up movie.
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