Thunderball was originally planned as the very first James Bond film, but a legal dispute erupted in 1961 when former Fleming collaborators Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham sued him, claiming the novel was based on a screenplay the trio had written together.

The lawsuit was settled out of court, with McClory retaining certain screen rights to the novel's plot and characters, which led producers Broccoli and Saltzman, fearing a rival McClory film, to give McClory sole producer credit while they served as executive producers.

Julie Christie was Broccoli's original choice for Domino, but he was disappointed after meeting her in person; Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway were also considered before former Miss France Claudine Auger was cast and her character rewritten to be French.

Claudine Auger's dialogue was ultimately dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl, who had voiced several previous Bond girls; another Domino contender, Luciana Paluzzi, ended up cast instead as the assassin Fiona Volpe, whose name was changed from Fiona Kelly to reflect Paluzzi's Italian nationality.

Director Guy Hamilton turned down the film, feeling creatively drained after Goldfinger, so Terence Young returned for his third and final Bond film as director.

Sean Connery, wary after reading the shark-pool scene in the script, insisted on a Plexiglas partition inside Largo's pool; when a shark broke through it during filming, Connery fled the pool in seconds, narrowly avoiding an attack.

Production designer Ken Adam rented a villa in the Bahamas with a saltwater pool that was filled with real sharks for underwater filming, and later recalled the smell as horrendous.

A special-effects team supplied what was believed to be a dead shark to be towed around the pool, but the shark revived mid-shoot; stuntman Bill Cummings demanded an extra £250 fee to be dropped into the shark pool as a double for the character Quist.

The Bell Rocket Belt jet pack used by Bond to escape the château in the pre-title sequence was a real, functioning device developed by Bell Aircraft Corporation, previously showcased at Super Bowl I and the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair.

Largo's yacht, the Disco Volante, was a real vessel built by combining a hydrofoil bought in Puerto Rico for $10,000 with a catamaran hull, joined by a one-inch slip bolt so it could split apart on cue.

During the yacht's climactic explosion, special-effects supervisor John Stears doused the boat with experimental rocket fuel without fully realizing its power; the resulting blast reportedly shattered windows in Nassau roughly 30 miles away.

The original title song, 'Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,' was recorded by Shirley Bassey but scrapped because the track ran too short for the titles and lacked the film's name in its lyrics; Tom Jones then recorded the replacement song 'Thunderball,' reportedly fainting after holding the final note during recording.

Country singer Johnny Cash also submitted a song titled 'Thunderball' for consideration, but it went unused.

Thunderball won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for John Stears in 1966 and earned Ken Adam a BAFTA nomination for production design.

The film was an enormous box-office success, grossing $141.2 million worldwide and surpassing all three preceding Bond films, remaining the highest-grossing entry in the series until Live and Let Die in 1973.