Critically, Casino Royale was widely panned.

Per Orson Welles, the only reason Casino Royale found success at the box office was because the poster featured the outline of a nude woman. For reference the most recent Bond movie from Eon was Thunderball in 1965 and had a budget of $5.5M. It began with a budget of $6M that quickly doubled into $12M.

Top it all off, Casino Royale was one of the most expensive films created to date. Several additional actors also refused to finish up their roles and in the end it was left to the editors to cobble something together out of this mess. In a desperate attempt to salvage the production, the directors brought in David Niven to add an additional, alternative side-plot. Eventually he stopped showing up for filming and later dropped out of the production entirely (some say he was fired). There were many other Peter Sellers incidents during production -he fired the blank of a gun in a co-star’s face and also got into a physical altercation with one of the directors. He hired his own scriptwriter to revise his lines in an effort to outshine Orson Welles and Woody Allen. After this incident, Sellers refused to appear alongside Welles in the film again, and Sellers was also disappointed because he wanted to play a serious character rather than a slapstick version of James Bond. Casino Royale is a haphazard, disjointed consolidation of various unconnected plot-threads that really would have been better served as a series of Saturday Night Live skits than a complete movie.ĭuring production Peter Sellers apparently had a major falling out with Orson Welles, perhaps owing to an invitation for Princess Margaret to visit the set (Sellers had boasted about his relationship with the royal family) but when she arrived on set she snubbed Sellers and favored Welles. The production is now somewhat legendary for being complete pandemonium, with no less than five different directors cycling through disparate segments of the film (in addition to at least one uncredited director), along with an army of script writers (which at one point included the legendary Billy Wilder). Very loosely based on Ian Flemings’ inaugural James Bond novel, 1967’s Casino Royale is a silly, chaotic, parody of the spy film genre.

Casino royale 1967 cast