1967 film directed by Lewis Gilbert
You Only Live Twice is a 1967 spy film and the fifth film in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions. The film's screenplay was written by Roald Dahl, and was loosely based on Ian Fleming's 1964 novel You Only Live Twice. It is the first of three Bond films to be directed by Lewis Gilbert, and is the first Bond film to discard most of Fleming's plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story.
You Only Live Twice stars Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond, who is dispatched to Japan after American and Soviet spacecraft vanish mysteriously, each nation blaming the other amidst the Cold War. Bond travels to a remote island to find the perpetrators, and comes face-to-face with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, an organisation that is working for the government of an unnamed Asian power, implied to be China, to provoke war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although the character Blofeld played a role in previous films, You Only Live Twice is the first film to depict him visually.
During the filming in Japan, it was announced that Sean Connery would leave the role of Bond, but after one film's absence, he returned in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever and later in 1983's non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again. You Only Live Twice received positive reviews and grossed over $111 million (equivalent to $1.1 billion in 2025) in worldwide box office. However, it was the first Bond film to see a decline in box-office revenue, primarily owing to the oversaturation of the spy film genre from Bond imitators, including a competing Bond film, Casino Royale, from Columbia Pictures (1967). The series continued with On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1969, the first official Bond film without Connery in the lead role.
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.