Excited For Daniel Craig’s Final 007 Movie? We Have Bad News
Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time Die has been delayed again. We thought we'd get it this spring, but will now have to wait much longer.
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Daniel Craig is set to wrap up his time as James Bond. But while we’ve known this would be the end for Craig as the British super-spy for some time, getting that final movie on the actual screen has faced more than a few timing hurdles. And it looks like we are going to have to wait for even more now. Originally rescheduled for an Easter weekend release this year, the last Craig-as-Bond movie has been moved again. Hopefully, this will be the last time.
This latest Daniel Craig James Bond film now has an open-ended timeline for release with no other details besides the fall of 2021. The constant yo-yo-ing around releasing No Time to Die has been brutal for fans who’ve been waiting with bated breath for this final installment with Craig in the lead. And the studio can’t be happy either. At the very best, this movie will have been delayed about 18 months from when it was originally supposed to be released.
Go back to April of 2020 when Daniel Craig and No Time to Die was originally scheduled for its wide release at the box office. Ah, those were somewhat simpler times when we thought pandemic-related movie theater closings wouldn’t last long, right? Wrong. The movie couldn’t be released then because of the pandemic and was pushed back to the fall. But that timing didn’t offer any reprieve either with many movie theaters still very much closed. So Easter weekend 2021 seemed like it could work. But again, nope that early-April timeline wasn’t to be.
For Daniel Craig, No Time to Die is slated to be his fifth James Bond film. It follows Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre. And as a franchise-within-a-franchise, those four films have put up somewhere in the range of $3.2 billion dollars at the box office while also playing really well with critics. Can you see why MGM would be incentivized to have this thing hit actual theaters? It’s been a money-printing machine and the hype around making it Craig’s last film only adds to the debonair spy’s allure.
It was reported back in October that MGM had shopped Daniel Craig and No Time to Die around to different streaming services in the hope of finding a home for it. This was even before the HBO Max / Wonder Woman 1984 announcements and MGM was simply looking to recoup some of the $300 million they’d already sunk into production and promotion.
But MGM couldn’t find a deal for the Daniel Craig film then and things don’t look a lot better now. It appears they are just going to stick it out in the hopes that theaters open up at some point like pre-pandemic times.
Daniel Craig’s final role as James Bond has moved so many times already that it’s tough to trust we even get this come next fall. But considering the timeless nature of the character, it should play well whenever it eventually screens. Even if that mystery date is some undetermined day way off in the distant future.
