From Moonraker cashing in on the Star Wars hype to Casino Royale borrowing the tone of The Bourne Idenтιтy, plenty of James Bond movies have taken influence from other films outside the franchise. The Bond series has been around for so long that a lot of recent Bond films have been influenced by earlier Bond films. No Time to Die harked back to the tragic love story of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the old formula of a climactic showdown at a villain’s extravagant lair. But the Bond movies have often looked to other films for inspiration.

There are plenty of non-Bond movies that the Bond movies have inspired. True Lies casts Arnold Schwarzenegger in a very 007-like secret agent role. The Austin Powers trilogy is a great parody of the Bond franchise. Kingsman: The Secret Service arrived as a refreshing throwback to the goofy earlier Bond movies amidst the gritty realism of the Daniel Craig era. But the inspiration goes both ways. The Bond franchise has taken plenty of influence from other movies, ranging from Scarface to Enter the Dragon to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

8

North By Northwest

Influenced From Russia With Love

North by Northwest is essentially what a Bond movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock would look like. Much like a typical Bond movie, it’s a spy thriller involving mystery, intrigue, plot twists, and huge action set-pieces. Cary Grant’s suave, charismatic hero is very similar to Sean Connery’s original 007: cool, collected, sharply dressed, and devilishly debonair. North by Northwest had a widespread influence on the action genre, and that included an impact on the second ever Bond movie, From Russia with Love.

In From Russia with Love, there’s a sequence in which Bond is attacked by a helicopter. It’s almost identical to the iconic scene in North by Northwest in which Grant is ambushed by a crop-duster swooping in from above. North by Northwest’s air attack is more memorable, but they’re both exhilarating sequences. From Russia with Love’s train scenes and framing of its female lead are also pretty similar to North by Northwest.

7

Shaft

Influenced Live And Let Die

Connery’s Bond movies all followed a pretty similar formula and stayed strictly within the confines of the traditions of the spy genre. When Roger Moore took over the role of 007, the producers began to experiment with different genres that were popular at the time. Moore’s first outing, Live and Let Die, borrowed a lot of its plot and stylistic elements from blaxploitation movies like Shaft, Foxy Brown, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadᴀsssss Song, which were popular in the late 1970s.

This becomes apparent early in the movie when Bond’s investigation sends him to Harlem, a common setting for blaxploitation films. Yaphet Kotto’s villain, Mr. Big, wouldn’t be out of place in a Pam Grier movie. He’s an unscrupulous New York drug lord hoping to put his rivals out of business. Drug dealers were frequently used as villains in blaxploitation movies like Coffy, which was notable because an anti-drug stance was unfashionable at the time of the counterculture movement.

6

Enter The Dragon

Influenced The Man With The Golden Gun

After serving up a Bond version of a blaxploitation movie in Live and Let Die, Moore starred in a Bond movie homage to martial arts films in his second outing, The Man with the Golden Gun. At the time, Bruce Lee movies like Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon had made kung fu films all the rage. The Man with the Golden Gun isn’t a martial arts movie from start to finish, but it does become one during a key sequence in its middle act.

When Bond poses as his latest enemy, Scaramanga, to meet suspected Thai criminal Hai Fat in Bangkok, the plan backfires as Scaramanga is secretly working at Fat’s estate. Bond is captured and brought to Fat’s martial arts academy, where his students fight to the death. There, the entire student body is instructed to kill 007, and he has to battle his way out of there. This is exactly the kind of ᴅᴇᴀᴅly predicament that Lee would find himself in over the course of one of his movies. Enter the Dragon, in particular, is all about a death match.

5

Star Wars

Influenced Moonraker

When George Lucas was trying to get his pᴀssion project Star Wars made, he struggled to find a studio that would finance his weird little space movie, because they didn’t think space would sell. Ironically, when Lucas finally got Star Wars made, it became such a monstrous blockbuster hit that every studio in Hollywood suddenly wanted to make space movies. Star Trek was resurrected as a movie franchise, Alien took the horror genre into the cosmos, and Roger Corman made his own ripoff, Battle Beyond the Stars.

Star Wars fever even affected the Bond franchise. The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me declared, “James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only.” But after the success of Star Wars, Eon decided to hold off on adapting For Your Eyes Only and focus on Ian Fleming’s only space-themed novel instead. Moonraker departed drastically from its relatively grounded source material to send 007 out of Earth’s atmosphere for a laser battle on a Death Star-style space station.

4

Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Influenced Octopussy

Star Wars isn’t the only Lucas creation that had an influence on the Bond franchise. Lucas’ other blockbuster, Raiders of the Lost Ark, inspired one of the campest Bond movies, Octopussy. With the Indiana Jones franchise, Steven Spielberg was heavily influenced by the Bond series. Spielberg had been turned down for the job of directing an official Bond movie on more than one occasion, but when his friend came to him with the idea for a nostalgic throwback to pulpy action-adventure serials of the 1930s, he saw an opportunity to create his own version of 007 for an American audience.

Poetically, after Bond inspired Indy, Indy inspired Bond. After the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Eon made an Indiana Jones-style Bond movie with Octopussy. Octopussy sends Moore’s 007 on an adventure through a treacherous jungle. He even swings from a vine and does a Tarzan yell. Octopussy features Indy’s least favorite animal, snakes, and other exotic wildlife that wouldn’t be out of place in an adventure with Dr. Jones.

3

Scarface

Influenced License To Kill

Timothy Dalton’s final outing in the role of 007, License to Kill, is arguably the darkest Bond movie ever made. It forgoes the usual formula of Bond taking an ᴀssignment from M, going on an official mission for MI6, and taking down a megalomaniac for political purposes. Instead, Bond abandons his official MI6 mission and goes rogue to exact revenge for a personal reason. He goes after the ruthless villain who maimed his close friend Felix Leiter and murdered Leiter’s bride.

The villain in question, drug lord Franz Sanchez, has a lot in common with the тιтular gangster in Brian De Palma’s blood-soaked classic Scarface. Much like Tony Montana, Sanchez is a notorious cocaine kingpin who uses torture to get what he wants. The aptest elevator pitch to ascribe to License to Kill would be Bond vs. Scarface, because that’s essentially what this movie is.

2

The Bourne Idenтιтy

Influenced Casino Royale

Since it began in the 1960s, the Bond franchise has been marked by pure escapism. Bond uses goofy, far-fetched gadgets, he chases supervillains with their own lairs and henchmen, and he finds himself in situations like being strapped to a table with a laser beam slowly inching its way up to his crotch. There’s a huge disparity between real-life espionage and the escapist antics of the Bond movies. In 2002, the Bond franchise was further from realism than ever before as 007 surfed on a tidal wave and fought a race-swapping villain in Die Another Day.

In the same year, The Bourne Idenтιтy came along and reinvigorated the spy genre with its gritty realism. The Bourne Idenтιтy and its sequels brought a Bond-esque superspy into the real world, with shaky camerawork and shady government conspiracies. When Pierce Brosnan relinquished the role of Bond to Daniel Craig and Eon rebooted the franchise with Casino Royale, they imbued it with some of that Bourne-style realism. Casino Royale brought Bond into the real world, with torture, visceral violence, and genuine spy work, and it resulted in one of the best entries in the franchise.

1

The Dark Knight

Influenced Skyfall

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight changed the face of blockbuster filmmaking. Nolan’s sprawling crime epic set on the streets of Gotham City proved that comic book movies — and big-budget franchise films in general — could be considered real cinema. It led to darker reboots of superhero franchises, like Man of Steel and The Amazing Spider-Man, as well as more “realistic” takes on typically fantastical properties, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and 2014’s Godzilla. Craig’s third outing in the role of Bond, Skyfall, was yet another movie influenced by The Dark Knight.

Javier Bardem’s iconic villain, Raoul Silva, is cut from the same cloth as Heath Ledger’s Joker. They’re both eccentric sociopaths who wage psychological warfare against the heroes. They’re both supposedly agents of chaos who actually have a meticulous plan. They both make surprisingly strong points, despite their questionable actions, and they both get caught on purpose. Director Sam Mendes also took inspiration from Nolan’s heavier, more dramatic approach to Bruce Wayne and dug deep into James Bond’s fractured psychology.