As it's the fifth year anniversary of Skyfall, film website BirthMoviesDeath have looked back at the film and unearthed some little-known trivia in doing so.
According to their article, the 23rd Bond film had a treatment (the step between a sketched out plot and screenplay) which would have given viewers not only a different title but a different plot.
They write, "A treatment by Peter Morgan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade called Once Upon a Spy which finds a young M during the Cold War, having an affair with a KGB spy in Berlin. The present-day plot involves that agent’s son blackmailing M and ends with Bond being forced to kill her."
“It didn’t work,” say the involved parties, and when MGM’s situation delayed a production start, the script was tossed. Mendes and Craig faced the delay by re-reading all 14 Ian Fleming novels. Skyfall was of course its own story, but those re-reads made their way to the eventual film, which leaned heavily on elements from Fleming’s You Only Live Twice and The Man With The Golden Gun for its story. "
What might have been, eh?
