No Time To Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga has revealed some of the alternate endings that were thought of for the film. No Time To Die is the 25th James Bond film and the fifth and final film to star Daniel Craig as the British spy himself. However, the film’s ending was unexpected for many, especially for James Bond fans. Spoiler alert: James Bond dies.
In No Time To Die, Bond has to stop Rami Malek’s Safin, a terrorist who has developed a nanobot virus that can kill people who share the same DNA identified by the nanobots. This bioweapon is used to kill all of Spectre and Safin plans to unleash it on the rest of the world. Bond is able to stop him, however, in their final fight, Safin gets the last laugh when he injects Bond with nanobots that could kill Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), Bond’s lover who is also the mother to his child. So, to save Madeleine and his daughter, Bond sacrifices himself when a series of rockets strike the factory where the nanobots are being manufactured.
In an interview with Variety, Craig and Fukunaga, along with Bond producers, spoke about the No Time To Die ending and the many ways in which they could have done it. The plan the whole time was to kill Bond but how he died was not official. According to Fukunaga, some of the ways Bond could have died included “blowing him up in a rocket” or “an anonymous bullet.”
“A bullet, like an anonymous bullet, I remember that one,” Fukunaga said. “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.”
Craig becomes the first Bond to actually die in a movie and, reportedly, this is something that Craig wanted to happen to his version of the character since his first appearance in Casino Royale. A post-credits scene says that James Bond will return, however, it will not be Craig’s version. Ultimately, there will be more James Bond movies as the iconic character will live on in pop culture, but this seemed to be the ending that Craig wanted for this version, even if it was controversial for diehard Bond fans.
