How the ‘Remo Williams’ Super Spy Franchise Crashed and Burned in the ’80s

In the early 1980s, the James Bond film series was in a period of transition, with aged series star Roger Moore, whose tenure as Bond began with the 1973 installment Live and Let Die and ended with the 1985 release of A View to a Kill, poised to retire as Bond. With the series in a state of upheaval, Hollywood saw an opening with which to create its own successor to Bond.

The first such contender appeared in 1982, with the debut of the NBC television series Remington Steele, starring future Bond series star Pierce Brosnan as a former con man and thief who assumes the titular fictional identity to help a female private investigator. The first big-screen attempt arrived in 1985, with the release of the action-adventure film Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, which is based on The Destroyer novel series, featuring the titular character, a New York cop whose death is faked so he can be trained to be an assassin for a secret black-ops United States organization called CURE.

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins was intended by its distributor, Orion Pictures, to establish the film’s titular character, played by Fred Ward, as the American answer to Bond. For this purpose, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins was directed by Guy Hamilton, who previously directed four Bond films, beginning with the great 1964 installment Goldfinger, while the screenplay was written by Christopher Wood, who wrote the scripts for the Bond films Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me.

However, despite its promising elements, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins became a box-office failure, which doomed hopes for the creation of a Remo Williams film series. Nearly 40 years after its initial release, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins has, in the course of gaining a strong cult following, become an enduring symbol of tantalizing, yet unfulfilled, potential.

‘Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins’ Is an Adult Version of ‘The Karate Kid’

The central student-teacher relationship in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins strongly resembles that of Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi from the 1984 martial arts drama film The Karate Kid and its various sequels. The key difference is that the student-teacher relationship in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is primarily geared toward turning the film’s titular character into a one-man killing machine.

Remo Williams: The Adventures Begins introduces Fred Ward as Sam Makin, a tough New York cop, and former Vietnam Veteran who is involuntarily recruited, through the faking of his death and transference of a new face and identity, into becoming an assassin for the secret United Organization, CURE, which was first established by President Kennedy for the purpose of defending America by any means necessary. Rechristened Remo Williams, Remo is trained to be a killing machine by Chiun, an elderly-seeming and extremely sarcastic Korean martial arts master played by Joel Grey.

While Mr. Miyagi practices a traditional Okinawa style of Karate, Chiun teaches Remo the fictional Korean martial art of Sinanju, from which Remo learns various amazing skills, including dodging bullets and the ability to run on concrete and water. Like The Karate Kid, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is propelled by the excellent on-screen chemistry of its stars, Grey and Ward, whose cross-cultural banter, in which Chiun’s Yoda-like knowledge clashes with his stubbornness, enables audiences to become emotionally invested in Remo’s journey. This relationship provides a solid foundation for future films if Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins performed well enough at the box office to warrant a sequel.

‘Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins’ Had Excellent Franchise Potential

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is grounded in the compelling origin story of the film’s titular character and his fascinating relationship with mentor Chiun. These elements elevate the film and transcend the film’s otherwise routine plot, in which Remo is tasked with neutralizing a corrupt weapons dealer. Despite its fairly bland main villain, the basic ingredients of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins inspire genuine curiosity and optimism regarding potential sequels, which could have taken the central concept in a variety of interesting directions.

Of course, the potential Remo Williams franchise hinged entirely on the first film’s box-office performance, which was entirely underwhelming. In its opening weekend of release, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins grossed just under $3.4 million, debuting in fourth place behind the Stephen King werewolf film Silver Bullet. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, which had a production cost of $15 million, finished its theatrical run with a lackluster total gross of approximately $14.4 million.

The most prominent explanation for the film’s box-office failure was that the film’s star, the beloved Fred Ward, lacked the commercial appeal to launch a successful franchise. When Ward, who died at the age of 79 in 2022, was cast as Remo Williams, distributor Orion Pictures was so confident in the film’s success that it signed Ward to play Remo in three films in the planned series.

‘Remo Williams’ Deserves a Feature Reboot or Television Series

In 1988, a one-hour Remo Williams television pilot titled Remo Williams: The Prophecy aired on ABC, with Jeffrey Meek in the title role and Roddy McDowall as Chiun. The 1988 pilot, which didn’t lead to a series, contains footage and music from the 1985 film and takes place one year after the events of the film. In 2014, Sony Pictures announced that Shane Black, a longtime fan of The Destroyer book series, was set to co-write and direct a feature film based on the book series. However, this project has languished over the past decade.

Approximately two years ago, Sony announced that Gordon Smith, a producer and writer best known for his work on the shows Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, was adapting The Destroyer book series into a television series. However, since this announcement, a series has yet to be confirmed. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins is streaming for free on Tubi.