The Man Who Brought James Bond to Town
More than 50 years before Thailand turned screen tourism into national strategy, Phuket cinema owner Wichit Na-Ranong saw the box-office potential of Phang Nga Bay.
Some men collect Bond memorabilia. Wichit Na-Ranong helped furnish the legend with an address.
Before Phang Nga Bay became a fixture on Thailand itineraries and before “set-jetting” entered the tourism lexicon, a young cinema owner in Phuket looked at its vertiginous limestone karsts and saw something else: a movie set worthy of the world’s most conspicuous secret agent.
In an episode of Trends, host David Barrett sits down with Khun Wichit, founder and managing director of Pearl Group of Companies and founder of The Slate Phuket, to revisit how a suggestion made more than half a century ago helped connect southern Thailand with one of cinema’s most durable franchises.
The story starts at the Pearl Cinema Theatre in Phuket Town.
Khun Wichit was a customer of United Artists and an enthusiastic James Bond fan who had developed a friendship with the distributor’s Thailand manager. When the opportunity arose, he floated an idea: bring the Bond production south.
“And I would suggest the location of Phang Nga Bay because it’s something very unique,” Khun Wichit recalls.
Unique was putting it mildly.
When scouts arrived in Thailand ahead of production on 1974’s The Man With the Golden Gun, Khun Wichit took them directly from the airport to Phang Nga Bay. Their schedule allowed for a single day before travelling onward to Singapore.
The scenery promptly rewrote the itinerary.
“And extended stay from one day to three days,” he says.
Singapore was postponed by telex. Hotel rooms were secured. Cameras came out and rolls of film began accumulating.
The resulting landscape would become Scaramanga’s tropical hideaway, placing Christopher Lee’s elegant assassin opposite Roger Moore’s equally immaculate James Bond against one of Asia’s most striking natural backdrops.
Khun Wichit’s involvement did not end with location scouting.
Asked to help coordinate the production locally, he agreed. A traditional wooden hotel in Phang Nga was renovated to accommodate the stars. Caterers were flown in from England. Meals travelled by helicopter. Exposed film made the considerably longer journey to London for processing before prints returned to Phuket for viewing at Na-Ranong’s Pearl cinema.
His fee for helping Hollywood navigate southern Thailand?
“And I never ask for a single baht from them.”
Producer Albert R. Broccoli later presented Khun Wichit with a treasured pipe as a token of thanks. But another reward soon became visible outside the cinema.
Foreign visitors began turning up in Phuket after seeing the locations on screen.
Today the phenomenon has a marketing-friendly name: set-jetting, the increasingly lucrative habit of choosing destinations after encountering them in movies and television.
What happened in Phang Nga Bay was an unusually early example and an extraordinarily durable one.
More than 50 years later, Khao Phing Kan and neighbouring Ko Tapu remain internationally identified with Bond. The shorthand “James Bond Island” has proved almost as persistent as the franchise itself.
Screen tourism has since become serious business. Expedia Group’s 2026 research found that 53% of travellers said their desire to take a set-jetting trip had increased over the previous year, while 81% of Gen Z and Millennial travellers planned trips influenced by destinations they had seen on screen. Expedia has estimated the trend could represent an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone.
Thailand has fresh evidence of its pulling power.
Following the premiere of HBO’s The White Lotus Season 3, filmed extensively in Thailand, Agoda reported a 12% increase in accommodation searches for Koh Samui, with U.S. searches jumping 65%.
Now the country is moving to turn that screen exposure into strategy.
Thailand’s Film Office is spearheading Thailand FILMAZING Year 2027, supported by the Tourism Authority of Thailand through its “Amazing Location Thailand: The Story Continues – From Scene to Scenic Journeys” initiative. Plans include international promotion and 10 curated routes connecting travellers with filming locations, as the country targets THB10 billion in foreign production revenue in 2027.
The numbers underscore how radically the landscape has changed.
A 1975 World Bank review recorded 1.107 million international arrivals to Thailand in 1974. Half a century later, Phuket alone received approximately 14.12 million tourists and visitors in 2025, generating an estimated THB545.4 billion, according to figures cited by the province’s governor.
The datasets are not directly comparable. The trajectory hardly needs explaining.
For Khun Wichit, however, the story has always been bigger than Bond.
Across more than five decades, his work in hospitality and tourism has made him an influential figure in Phuket’s development, earning him the affectionate moniker “The Father of Tourism to Phuket.”
Bond brought the cameras. Na-Ranong remained when they left.
That distinction matters because the spectacular landscape captured on film is not merely a backdrop. Phang Nga Bay is an ecosystem, a community and a source of livelihoods. Its enduring screen fame brings economic opportunity but also the responsibility of managing the visitors that fame attracts.
There is a neat symmetry to Thailand’s current ambitions.
In 2027, the country plans to deliberately harness the relationship between production and tourism through incentives, location promotion and film-inspired journeys.
Back in 1974, one Phuket cinema owner had already grasped the basic proposition.
Put an extraordinary place on the screen and the audience may eventually come looking for it.
Wichit Na-Ranong didn’t call it set-jetting.
He simply knew a great location when he saw one.
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