'Licence To Kill': The (Tragic) Evolution of an Ad Campaign

LICENCE TO KILL
The (Tragic) Evolution of an Ad Campaign

The first piece of promo art for Bond 16. The provocative title (the first non-Fleming title) suggested "License Revoked" would be a very special Bond movie indeed.

Every effort was made to come up with a fresh new ad campaign that told the audience LICENSE REVOKED would be a different kind of Bond movie. Some of the results;

It looked like this poster by Bob Peak — of TSWLM and Star Trek fame — would be the teaser;

But then "License Revoked" campaign is junked in favor of a teaser poster reminiscent of The Living Daylights. Nice poster, but the title change to 'Licence To Kill' suggested trouble ahead…

Trouble indeed. MGM/UA implodes and the Bond marketing campaign is handed off to the guys at Kinko’s. The result, this abominable one-sheet.

International distributor UIP goes their own way and creates their own campaign — which is not really much of an improvement.

But then there's this variant poster used in the UIP campaign that I think is pretty sharp.

Outside of the UK Bond is dressed in a tux in the UIP campaign. It's an improvement, I think.

What was supposed to be a very special, groundbreaking Bond film looks like the most generic of the batch when it reaches DVD. And isn’t that a pic from TLD?

It started off as a promising campaign and it's quite obvious how it ended.