No Time to Die: There Were Potential Alternate Endings to Daniel Craig’s Final James Bond Film
It’s never simple when a James Bond actor steps down and hands over the role or costume to another actor. Daniel Craig’s last performance as James Bond was in the 2021 film No Time to Die, though the manner in which he retired has been a source of heated debate and argument among fans.
The last scene of the film featured an injured Bond escaping from Safin’s facility. The sinister antagonist, played by Rami Malek, attacks our hero and injects him with Heracles, a bioweapon bonded to the DNA of a target that is poisonous for their relatives to touch. Realizing that he can’t live with Madeleine or his daughter, Bond climbs the bunker and surrenders to death as ballistic missiles rain down on it.
In terms of plot and execution, No Time to Die was the ultimate swansong for Craig’s version of the suave secret agent, which is why it becomes obvious upon a rewatch that the creators intended to kill off the hero from the start. The manner of death, on the other side, was something of a mystery. A variety of alternatives were seriously considered.
In a new interview with Variety, Cary Joji Fukunaga discusses some of the alternate endings for No Time to Die. In the filmmaker’s own words:
“How he meets his end wasn’t decided yet. It was just the fact that he would, so the question then became how to do it. There were many iterations. A bullet, like an anonymous bullet, I remember that one. But it just seemed like a conventional weapons death didn’t seem appropriate. Given how much he had been able to escape from everything else, the fact that it would just be a bullet that always had your name on it from the beginning, as a sort of the thematic element seemed, while realistic, for Bond it had to be something even beyond that — like the impossible, impossible situation.”
The producers ultimately decided to send James Bond out in a poetic way rather than an intimate scenario involving a person or a bullet, which serves the emotional significance of the sequence far more effectively in hindsight.
What do you think about the ending of No Time To Die?
About James Bond
James Bond is a fictional character and one of the most iconic characters in literature and cinema, said to be created by author Ian Fleming. James Bond is the protagonist of through more than twenty books written by Fleming. He had also appeared in numerous films since 1962, ten played by Sean Connery, three by George Lazenby, four by Roger Moore, two by Timothy Dalton, six by Pierce Brosnan and one each by David Niven, Daniel Craig and Lewis Gilbert.
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