No Time To Die's Ending Takes On A Dark New Meaning Now That Amazon Owns James Bond

Movies Action & Adventure Movies

Daniel Craig debuted as James Bond in a film that promised a new era for 007 — one which retained all the best parts of the franchise's history, jettisoned the rest, and added an element of realism that gave Bond a dimensionality that he'd never had before. 2006's "Casino Royale" remains the best James Bond movie ever made. Then things sort of went off the rails.

By the time 2021's "No Time to Die" arrived, the Craig films had become muddled affairs — the result of EON Productions trying to combine the grittiness of Craig's debut with all the Bond trademarks that had been so expertly subverted in "Royale." It all culminated in a controversial ending that saw 007 buried beneath missile fire on Lyutsifer Safin's (Rami Malek) private island in a scene that would have been unthinkable in the more grounded "Royale" days.

For me, and many other Bond fans, killing the character for the first time on-screen just didn't sit right. It wasn't necessarily that Bond should never be killed on-screen — though some argue 007's death is antithetical to the very DNA of the character — it's that "No Time to Die" and the three movies preceding it hadn't earned the right to take such a massive swing. If you're going to kill Bond for the first time in his 60-year on-screen history, you not only better have a damn good reason, you better make sure it feels earned within the story you're telling, and "No Time to Die" just didn't meet those standards. As Jordan Hoffman wrote in The Guardian, "Surely Daniel Craig, [director] Cary Joji Fukunaga, and the 007 producers wanted to put some punctuation at the end of this, the more serious, post-9/11 era of James Bond. But is fundamentally altering the DNA of their character the way to go? Are there not some lines in the sand you do not cross?"

Now, with the news that Amazon owns the James Bond franchise outright, a line certainly does seem to have been crossed and Bond fans are bracing for what could very well be an even more nauseating era in the saga. That is to say that Jeff Bezos and co. are almost certain to cook up a Bond cinematic universe and rinse the ever-loving hell out of the franchise moving forward. But while we all fret over the future of England's greatest spy, perhaps we're overlooking what this piece of news tells us about Bond's past. Specifically, his demise in "No Time to Die."

Did EON know their time with Bond was coming to an end?

Amazon might well have pried the Bond franchise from the hands of longtime Bond custodians Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, but it clearly took some doing. For decades now, Broccoli (the daughter of original Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli) and Wilson have been famously protective of the property, and while they haven't always made the best decisions, they've clearly taken seriously their jobs as keepers of the Bond name. Will Amazon be so discerning? Probably not, although /Film's Nick Staniforth argues as much in his very British reaction to the Bond/Amazon news. Either way, the fact of the matter is that we simply don't know what will become of Bond in the near future.

What we do know, however, is that it wasn't just Daniel Craig's Bond that died in "No Time to Die," but the EON era of Bond itself. Craig's version of the spy was the last iteration to be part of what will now surely become known as one big golden era in the franchise when EON and the Broccoli family oversaw all 25 official movies. As such, the question of whether Broccoli and Wilson knew they were going to relinquish control of the franchise before making "No Time to Die" becomes an intriguing one. Did these veteran Bond protectors see the writing on the wall? Is that why Bond was bombarded with ballistics in the last movie? If so, does that change how we might view that controversial ending?

"No Time to Die" director Cary Joji Fukunaga previously spoke to Empire about the 25th Bond movie and claimed 007's demise was set before he even came on board. "In my first meeting with Daniel and the producers, they said that's how they wanted the story," he said. "They felt that was an ending." Why, after 60 years of Bond, were Broccoli and Wilson set on killing off the character? Sure, the Craig era had tried new things with the movies in order to reinvigorate the character for a new generation, but killing him off? That's a huge decision and one that surely wasn't taken lightly. 

The fact that it came from the producers and not from a conversation that involved Fukunaga, and had been decided before production on "No Time to Die" even got underway suggests the producers at least had an inkling that their era of Bond was about to come to an end.

Killing Bond was an emphatic ending to the EON era

If you take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page for "No Time to Die," you will see a solid "certified fresh" rating of 83%. But if you look closely at the positive reviews, quite a few of them aren't exactly glowing. In his otherwise favorable review, Peter Travers lamented a "sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways." Writing for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane admitted the movie is "often exciting" but added that "there's something inward and agonized about the thrills, and the insouciance of Connery's epoch, for better or worse, seems like ancient history." Justin Chang's NPR review claims that watching Craig is "a poignant pleasure [...] even if the movie around him is seldom as good as he is," while in his "Fresh" Rolling Stone review, K. Austin Collins writes, "As a movie, Bond-related or otherwise, it's just fine."

All of which is to say that while "No Time To Die" clearly has its adherents, it was hardly the triumph that Craig deserved for his final outing — and judging by the negative takes, a lot of that has to do with the mawkish sentiments of the movie, which are ultimately crystalized in that final, grandiose death scene at the end of "No Time to Die," which seemed so at odds with how Craig's tenure started out. As Richard Brody wrote in his "No Time to Die" review for the New Yorker, "Craig's distinctive persona suggests pathos that the series doesn't allow; instead, he's merely used as a Bond-piñata, a straining for an element of realism amid stunts that, in their grandiosity and their excess, preclude it."

But now we know Amazon is in control of Bond moving forward, thus bringing an end to the EON era, perhaps that mawkish ending is a little easier to take. If I were handing a British institution off to Jeff Bezos and his streaming company I'd blow him to smithereens before I handed over the wreckage, too. While it doesn't necessarily make "No Time to Die" a better movie, the elaborate climax is perhaps a little more fitting considering it wraps up not just Craig's tenure, but the age of Bond that gave us Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Craig himself. Whatever comes next might well turn out to be better than expected, but it will undoubtedly be a new age of Bond. 

As such, EON ending their run as emphatically as they did suddenly starts to seem less like an egregious transgression against the very substance of the character, and more a defiant statement as Bond heads into a new world.