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Dominic Sandbrook in *The Great British Dream Factory* argues that this would not have been good for Ian Fleming's most famous character:
"But then, in November 1955, the Rank Organisation offered him [Ian Fleming] £5,000 for *Moonraker*. It seemed an obvious marriage: the adventures of an upper-class British secret agent, made by the most celebrated film company in the land. But Rank's script department failed to produce a workable adaptation, and even though Fleming wrote a draft screenplay himself, the negotiations dribbled into the sand.
"As Fleming's biographer Andrew Lycett puts it, Rank's failure to secure the Bond rights compares with Decca turning down the Beatles. But if Rank *had* secured the Bond rights, the chances are that the character would be largely forgotten today. By this point, the Rank Organisation had largely given up on making big-budget pictures for the American market, and had they been given the chance to turn *Moonraker* into a film, the chances are that it would have been a relatively small-scale affair, with Bond played by a company stalwart such as Kenneth More or Dirk Bogarde. Instead Fleming had to wait for his film deal until 1961, selling the Bond rights to the Canadian–American partnership of Harry Saltzman and the memorably named Albert R. Broccoli..." https://books.google.com/books?id=IlPBBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT251