James Bond fandom (The Bond Community) is an international and informal community drawn together by Ian Fleming's James Bond series. The fandom works through the use of many different forms of media, including fan clubs, web sites and fanzines.
Various Bond film shooting locations have become fan tourism locations.
Several YouTube channels and podcasts, such as The Bond Brain on Spotify, help to keep the fan community active.
Fan clubs and fan web sites
The first James Bond Fan Club was founded in 1972 by Richard Schenkman and Bob Forlini, two high school students from Yonkers, NY. In 1974 they began publishing a magazine called BONDAGE, which was at first mimeographed and stapled together.
The James Bond British Fan Club was founded in 1979 and went through various impressive incarnations until it became nothing more than a news website.
MI6-HQ.com was founded in 1998. Press organisations and websites that mention this site include Entertainment Weekly and MTV. The site maintains a comprehensive listing of the films' technological features and a user forum.
Notable publications devoted to the James Bond phenomenon include 007 MAGAZINE (1979-2019), published by Graham Rye, 007 MAGAZINE & ARCHIVE Limited (www.007magazine.com); and the now defunct Goldeneye, originally published by the Ian Fleming Foundation.
During the 2000s, participants in the various websites and chat rooms devoted to Bond engaged in daily discussions comparing and assessing the films, the Bond girls, and the villains.
Contributors to the fan site commanderbond.net have been credited with discovering the plagiarism in the novel Assassin of Secrets, which was published in the US by Little, Brown and Company and then withdrawn.
Fan-made computer game remake
GoldenEye: Source is a total conversion mod in development using the Source engine developed by Valve for the computer game, Half-Life 2. GoldenEye: Source is based on the award-winning Nintendo 64 video game, GoldenEye 007, featuring Bond. An alpha release was distributed on 25 December 2005 receiving more than 65,000 downloads in 2 weeks. A Beta release of GoldenEye: Source was scheduled for 25 December 2006, but was released on 26 December 2006.
In January 2007 it was awarded twice in the 2006 annual Moddb awards, a win in Editor's Choice for the Reinvention category, and was player-voted 3rd place in the overall category Mod of the year. A significant rise from the 2005 awards, which earned GoldenEye: Source 4th place in the unreleased category.
On 5 December 2007 one of the developers released an unofficial patch. This patch fixes some of the bugs there are present in the first beta version. The developer team will not support this patch, and support is only available in a topic in the GoldenEye: Source forum.
Fan demographics
In 2012, the polling organization YouGov conducted a survey of US Bond fans, with a particular focus on their preferences for actors. Sean Connery led in all groups, which were categorized by age cohort, gender, and party affiliation. It found that 60% of Americans described themselves as fans and that fandom "crosses gender, party, and age lines." More Barack Obama voters (65%) called themselves fans than did Mitt Romney voters (59%). Hollywood.com analyzed Facebook mentions of the film Skyfall shortly after its release and found that among men, those aged 25 to 34 made the most frequent mentions and that mentions in the United Kingdom exceeded those in other countries. It found that 52% of the Facebook users who described themselves as Bond fans were female. Fan demographics are considered by the filmmakers and the firms seeking product placement. Smirnoff vodka, which had been featured in Bond films since Dr. No, was replaced with Finlandia vodka in Die Another Day. A Smirnoff representative said that the company had lost interest in the Bond audience, whose major demographic they saw as men aged 25 to 45, and that it was seeking younger, more social customers aged 21 to 29.
Mark O'Connell published Catching Bullets: Memoirs of a Bond Fan in 2012, describing his fandom in the context of being gay.
Bond tourism
Several Bond film settings have become fan tourism destinations.
Ko Tapu found fame through the 1974 film The Man with the Golden Gun. It is now often known as James Bond Island and is toured by as many as 1,000 visitors per day.