Watched this last night on a very nice quasi-IMAX screen. Phenomenal film, a fitting tribute to Craig's tenure as Bond and the entire franchise, and truly one of the few films I've watched recently that had me invested and excited about nearly every single scene. Loved the tributes to On Her Majesty's Secret Service especially. Hard to imagine them ever topping this, and it's a great juncture to take the franchise in a fresh direction.
I don't get why people bother about the money a film gonna make. It's not your money, so the only concern should be if the movie is good and a work of art in it's own right. I mean, we don't have the "sales" discussion for any recording artist. Why do we have them for films? They will recoup anyway. They probably recouped before they shot a single frame of film, as long as it makes some money on initial theatrical run. That's how the series rides on.
Sure, we do. People talk about how singles/albums sold all the time. It is true that box office details have become much more "public" over the last 20 years or so, though. Used to be we only really paid attention for movies that sold skillions or tickets or those that really bombed, but now it's a topic of conversation all the time - along with budgets and the like...
Here's an article that puts things into perspective. No Time to Die box office - has it been a hit? It may not be blowing the door off the box office, but it's certainly no bomb and I doubt Eon and MGM/Universal are that surprised by how it's doing. Although there are certain caveats. (See below). I'm sure they wish it was doing more business here and it looks like China may be a challenge, but given the fluid covid situation and the year and a half delay in release racking up interest, this film was going to be hard pressed breaking even, let alone turning a huge profit. I don't think you'll have to worry. Broccoli and Wilson has said over and over that James Bond is male and will never be replaced by a woman. We may see a man of color in the role (and even that i sort of doubt right now, and at least for Craig's replacement), but rest assured, James Bond is here to stay. The ones who seem to care the most probably want to conflate the ending and Bond's death and the supposedly "wokeness" of this film (which is utter malarky) as being THE reason this film underperformed here in the USA thus far. There are a lot of things to unpack about it. The pandemic being a big factor, the fact that Bond films audience skews older than your average comic book movie fan and its that older demographic that is still reticent about going back to the theater. The lack of turn out of the younger demographic for this movie is a problem, as @Vidiot posted about a few pages back, but that's not the fault of this movie or Craig, but a problem the franchise has struggled with for awhile. Trying to catch a bigger share of the younger audience is something Eon will probably have to address or expect to start budgeting their films more conservatively. Especially since 600-800 million is the general ceiling for a Bond film, Skyfall not withstanding. That film was a unicorn. It was the perfect hype storm that put it over the top.
I was definitely one of those people. There MUST be a clear cut intention they had doing that on screen because in the past, what, 26 MOVIES nothing like that has ever happened and I guess that means there's more to it than just phasing Craig out. It will be interesting to see where they take it from there.
I agree Blofeld and Madeline's performances were brilliant. I hadn't been super attracted to that actress...until finishing NTTD. Call me crazy. The single Blofeld scene was so well done in my opinion I couldn't help but liken to Anthony Hopkins' first scene in Silence of the Lambs. I thought the foggy temperate jungle fight scene after crashing the Toyota was brilliant as well. Some amazing settings and shots in my opinion.
Did Daniel Craig insist on the downbeat ending for NTTD? I think that may be what bothers me about it -- feels like an actor's request instead of something organic or that completed Bond's arc (which was kind of completed in Skyfall, to be honest).
Heracles self-immolates after he gets poisoned by his wife, Deianeira. So he goes out in blaze of glory and then gets his apotheosis. It's all there in the myth, which is why I liked the ending: Bond can die but 007 will live on. The very last scene has Madeline tell her daughter a story about a man named Bond. I thought that was a great touch.
I saw the film this evening and thoroughly enjoyed it. A terrific thriller with some superb action sequences. The best Craig movie of the franchise.
What I like about the ending is that it opens the door for more audacious films in the Bond series. They have now several avenues they can explore: - They can continue with a new actor, and the MI6 cast, with some explanation about how 007 survives the bombing You Only Live Twice style, he is found his face torn off, they do plastic surgery reconstruct, he as amnesia... the vilains send him brainwashed to kill M (it was in the novel decades before Bourne). This allows to continue with him not knowing about Madeline and child and obviously cured of nanobots stuff. - They can do a one off The Dark Knight Returns style, with an older Bond (obviously Brosnan, but why not Timothy Dalton), out of continuity. - They can go back before Casino Royale, and explore Bond as a twenty something before he became an agent. I know Michael G. Wilson wrote a script before The Living Daylights, which was just that. When I asked him about it during the SPECTRE promo, he said he forgot, and Barbara added he wrote so many stuff he can't remember stuff from 30 years back. But I'm sure they dusted it off since and are considering the pro and cons. (pro being you get the younger audiences back, prequel trilogy style). Think about it, they could even have Bond having a one off sexual encounter with a man in his youth, giving context to the Skyfall homosexual seduction quote. The internet would explode, and this is promo money you can't buy. - They can get a new actor on missions, and ditch all continuity with the Craig era. - They could do spin-off with either a woman hero like Ana Celia de Armas (her moment in the film looks like a back-door pilot entry a bit and people love her), or a black hero like Felix Leiter. Any of those can be either on the big screen, or in streaming as limited series. The possibilities, the gates, are all open. Which incidentally is what 007 does at the end of the film.
Never said it was a "bomb." It's made $452 million worldwide, but the problem is it cost more than $250M plus as much as $50M in unanticipated interest (due to 18 months of the delayed release). Simple Hollywood math says it has to make $600M just to break even. It opened more than 2 weeks ago... if they haven't hit $600M in another month, I'd say they have a problem. Even if they break even, it's never going to hit $1 billion like Skyfall, which is what they were hoping for. There's a bomb, there's a smash hit, and then there's a movie that barely does OK... and I think that's what we have here. It doesn't lose money, but it doesn't really make any money, either. It took them 5 years to make this film -- from the time the story was developed until it finally got released -- and that's a huge investment in time and money that didn't quite pay off. I liked the film quite a bit, but I can also sit back and be objective and say, "I like it, but this is not a big mass-market film." More than one analyst has said, "maybe it's time for the Bond producers to try a completely different tactic, like doing the Bond films as huge, big-budget streaming TV shows." And I don't think that's a bad idea, provided they do them well. Why the James Bond producers should embrace TV after 'No Time to Die'
Not sure they would go down that route but imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth this would cause in some areas of the fanbase. Interestingly though if you go back to Fleming's source material there is some suppressed homeerotic stuff going on there as well as the sado-masochism that Fleming had an interest in. My feeling is EON will let the dust settle, announce the new James Bond early next year and just carry on as before. I hope they go with Bond at some point in his career where he is an established 00 agent and back to some stand alone missions without having all the convolution required if trying to connect everything. But we will see.
If they were to go down this route then it would be great if they made it a period piece and took Bond back to the 50's and 60's and closer to Fleming's original creation.
There's a global pandemic in the UK too but the film, so far, is a major hit in Bond's country. Same for France. There's still time to collect money in the US. Shang-Chi made $200+ M in the USA, so those that want to go to the movies, just go. I should've been more specific; I probably said "studio's fault" but it's really just Broccoli and Wilson. Just plain wrong delaying movies because a director or an actor asks one more year off because they have to think about their business, first. That's a major mistake imho...could've taken advantage of the Skyfall wave and made another one in 2014. I girl I was going out with at that time, and her friends, were thrilled that Adele sang the theme song and she/they attended a screening just because of their fave singer. That was a brilliant marketing move and I suspect it's not just that bunch of people that were brought to the cinema by the insanely popular Mrs. Adkins. She brought fans to Bond and vice versa. It helped that the song was stunning and the film was well made despite several plot holes; I also don't really like the final act, and way too much screentime for M but hey... $1.1 Billion and counting. Financially, can't argue with success. Those new 2012-2013 fans should've been kept, even with videogames as previously suggested. But Spectre made approximately $230M less than Skyfall; 20% less. "No time to die" will probably do even less. Fast and Furious 9 made about $700M worldwide; haven't seen it but I bet No time to die is 1000 times better. Sadly, kids and younger people are not that keen on Bond anymore. The main F & F star is even older than Craig but clearly Universal found a better way to drum up interest for that franchise.
I never said you were calling it a bomb, but there were a few others up thread heavily hinting at such . I mentioned that you posted an article that had good points regarding its problems financially. And I largely agree with you.. The Bond films are roughly making the same they always have, and the built in audience still turned out,but the budget keeps rising and its at this point it's an untenable situation. Either MGM/Eon are going to have to keep their budget more modest (i.E. 150 million or less) or find some way to grow the audience and market the franchise in different ways, and a television series could be one way. To their credit, EON has been pretty picky and protective of the brand and have avoided oversaturating product tie ins and the like, but they may have to slightly rethink this approach and consider all possibilities. They don't have to go crazy like Disney does with Star Wars and Marvel, but some more creative marketing to meet younger people and get a younger audience to go see your movie is definitely needed. How they do it I'm not sure.
I think the problem is that 6 years is simply too long between sequels that aren't standalone adventures...I definitely had to brush up on my Spectre before seeing this one. Please don't let Bond become a TV series.
When all is said and done, I think NTtD will bring in as much as Skyfall, despite the weaker opening song. It's off to a weak start, but that's to be expected. The home video revenues have not even started to pour in. Skyfall was my least favorite Craig outing as Bond. He went from being a newly minted double-0 to a has-been overnight if you consider Casino Royale and QoS were basically set at the same time. The "Bond is over-the-hill" theme of Skyfall was obnoxious and unnecessary, and I didn't like Javier Bardem's performance as a Bond villain. It was a far cry from the edgy, menacing performance he gave as Chigur in No Country for Old Men. NTtD was better in every respect except the song of course. As for Fast and Furious, I guess audiences like rap music in the score and F-bombs in the writing--but I don't know because I never saw a F&F film and never will. Rap and f-bombs are a sign of the times. Just be glad Eon/MGM isn't catering to that audience.
Well, Silva's motivation made sense, for one thing. Not sure why Safin was trying to kill millions of people. I also think the Daniel Craig/Judi Dench dynamic was fantastic and the films lost something without it.
Safin hated humanity because of his childhood trauma, which was explained early on in NTtD. I generally hate villains like Silva who are good agents gone bad. And as discussed in another thread (or maybe it was a few pages back in this thread?) the Dench dynamic with Craig was like schoolmarm chastizing a naughty boy misbehaving in class. As good as Dench is, it got old fast. I prefer the more traditional dynamic with Fiennes and Craig.
That final toast to Bond in NTTD was so perfunctory and emotionless it almost played like bad comedy. Not saying every M has to be a parental figure but I thought it worked like gangbusters with Dench and Craig, especially paralleled with Silva. Ah well.
Yeah. The Dench relationship got tiring and I didn’t care. She may be a national treasure in Britain but to me she’s as much fun as a a bitchy junior high school principal. Once again, M, Q… these guys used to have tiny parts to set things up, and the rest was following Bond in action. I hate this huge team hovering around Bond. I liked James Bond because he could DO IT ALONE. Everybody wants to turn their thing into Star Wars where everyone is a unique breakout character. I can hardly wait for the Q rainbow series. Did Indiana Jones have a huge team backing him up.? Did Ulysses? The nature of the hero is the man alone. They screwed it up
Yeesh, the complaints in this thread . . . Okay, I get that longtime fans are thrown off by the out-of-character unhappy ending, but all the other "problems" proclaimed unacceptable seem really trivial. Maybe they should have Photoshop-ed Craig's face onto a Sean Connery installment and called it a day? I mean, how exactly do we want them to hew to the formula?
I don't disagree with you about the ending. But I was thinking how I would have done it differently and I couldn't come up with anything other than just ending it with those missiles exploding on the island. And I think Bond did deserve a more proper send-off. Good point, although he did pretty much save the world singlehandedly. Just a bit of support here and there from other agents who he helped more than they helped him.
Hey, blame Variety No Time to Die Box Office: Takeaways From Daniel Craig's Final Bond - Variety from the article: If they're not reliable, I don't know who else could be in that field.
its done very well at the international box office and has yet to open in China. So while its true it will struggle to break even, it's still not out of the equation that it still may yet break even or come just under. So, we won't know for another month or more where it will all shake out. The world box office is no longer made or broken by how a movie does here anymore. The budget, which was ridiculously high for this installment, coupled with the millions accumulated interest from the theatrical delays, plus the millions they spent in marketing leading up to the original release date back in early 2020, having to put a halt to all of that, only to have to ramp it up again a year and a half later....all of that has put this film at a disadvantage to the point that even a Skyfall level of success would have meant only a tiny profit, and the previous Craig era bonds would have all underperformed in relation to this set of circumstances. In other words, other than some sort of miracle, there was nearly no scenario where NO TIME TO DIE wasn't going to struggle to break even. It was half way under water to begin with. That is partially Ion and MGM'S fault for not managing the budget to account for expectations to begin with, but no one saw covid coming and it has indeed taken its toll on this film financially. The only way it would have done better is if the same young 20 something demographic came out in force to see NTTD the same way they turned out to see Venom 2 and Shang Chi the previous weeks....and they didn't. Bond is just not getting a big enough slice of that demographic. Usually that wouldn't have been that big of a deal, because the older demographic would have balanced things out, but a lot of people who would have gone out to see it in the theater decided not to risk contracting a potentially respiratory viral Infection and decided to just wait until it comes home. The tone of the conversation a page or so back seems to sort of ignore those larger facts....and the insinuation that was being made was that the film was "bombing" and that was largely because of the downbeat ending, which there is no evidence that it being even a small factor. In theory it could be, and if we lived in a parallel timeline where the movie came out in April 2020 as it was supposed to, and if it still underperformed then, and there was a loud condemnation of the ending accompanying it, then the case could be made. It would still be a shaky case that's tied to anecdotal evidence, but, ok. However we live in a world where this movie was delayed 18 months and is opening in a theatrical market that's still trying to rebound across all demographics in the middle of a still ongoing public health crisis. Even if the ending was some triumphant happy ending or the usual classic Bond ending where he's shagging the latest Bond girl on a raft in the ocean somewhere or something similar, its very doubtful this movie would be doing any better. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances that accounts for the lower than usual US totals, and is far more complicated than some here seem to want to acknowledge. Not talking about you specifically btw, just to be clear.
