James Bond is back with a vengeance. Casino Royale, the long-awaited 21st film in the series, took more than £13 million at the box office this weekend.

Cinemagoers flocked to see Daniel Craig’s 007 wrestle with his conscience, suffer unspeakable torture and show off his much-publicised physique in clingy blue swimming trunks.

According to the film’s distributors, Casino Royale easily beat the £9.1 million record set by Die Another Day in 2002.

Peter Taylor, of Sony Pictures, said yesterday: “It’s the most successful opening weekend of any Bond film. The takings are 40 per cent ahead of Die Another Day. It is in the top three [British] weekend openings of all time. We are delighted — it’s a great testament to the quality of the movie.

“The reviews have all been excellent and audiences are also loving this picture. They are welcoming the reinvention of this franchise.”

In the United States, Casino Royale was pushed into second place by a tap-dancing cartoon penguin. According to studio estimates, Happy Feet took $42.3 million (£22.3 million), $1.7 million more than Bond.

Mr Taylor is confident, however, that Casino Royale will beat the $456 million that Pierce Brosnan’s last appearance in the role grossed worldwide. But analysis by The Times shows that the real targets are the films that appeared much earlier in the series.

Judged on box-office receipts alone, the Brosnan Bonds are by far the most successful. Dr No, in which 007 made his big-screen debut and Ursula Andress emerged from the sea in a white bikini, is the least successful. But by adjusting for inflation, a different picture emerges.

Sean Connery is regularly voted the best Bond in fan surveys so it should come as no surprise that his films dominate the list of biggest-grossing Bond films in real terms.

Thunderball is number one, followed by Goldfinger, which has Pussy Galore and Shirley Bassey’s opening song to recommend it. You Only Live Twice, in which Connery battles Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld, is fourth.

Roger Moore’s light-hearted Bond outings Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me are third and fifth on the list. More recent Bond films fare less well. Brosnan’s adventures are midway down the list while Timothy Dalton’s brief tenure in the role occupies two of the bottom three places.

Casino Royale’s performance at the box office stacks up favourably against the biggest films of the year, including Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and The Da Vinci Code. But the biggest box-office successes in Britain have been the Harry Potter films, with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban taking £23.8 million in its opening weekend.

Casino Royale’s performance continues a good year for British film talent. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan topped the US box office for two weeks while the directors Paul Greengrass and Stephen Frears made strong impressions with United 93 and The Queen respectively. The former is set aboard one of the aircraft hijacked in the 9/11 attacks and the latter deals with the Royal Family’s reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

But Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound magazine, said that such successes gave a false impression of the state of the British film industry “British talent has done well this year but are all of these British films?” he said. “We can’t afford to make a Bond film in this country. What we tend to think of as British films are actually American products made with American money.”

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