#No Time to Die Director Explains Alternative Endings for Daniel Craig’s James Bond

Daniel Craig always knew where his time as James Bond was heading, but Cary Joji Fukunaga says No Time to Die’s ending was never set in stone.

When it was announced that Daniel Craig would be ending his James Bond run with No Time to Die, the question was always going to be how would the actor’s departure from the long-running franchise pan out. While we now know the answer to this, it appears that there was not always a definite ending in place for the super spy and director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who was brought in to replace Danny Boyle who left the movie early in production, has opened up about some of the alternative endings that were on the cards for Bond. Spoilers for No Time To Die await in the rest of this article, so press your ejector button now if you don’t want to see them.

No Time to Die promised to end Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond in a big way, and considering the happy ending of Spectre it seemed that the only way to do that would be to bring something never before seen to the franchise. As we now know, the way to do that was to become the first movie to actually kill off James Bond. With a plot that revolves around a blood-borne nanobot virus, the climax of the movie sees Bond sacrificing himself to ensure the destruction of the factory the movie’s villain Safin is using to prepare a bioweapon attack on the world.

While Bond’s ultimate fate was sealed with a missile strike on the factory, which he instigated knowing full well that it would mean his own death, Fukunaga revealed in an interview with Variety that the way the 007 agent would die was not something that was set in stone from the start and actually had some other iterations. He revealed:

“There was a few things that Barbara and Michael and Daniel had earmarked. This was definitely one of them. 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, many iterations. Blowing him up in a rocket. 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.”

It is not unfair to say that the method of Bond’s death needed to be something that was impossible for him to survive. After all, even during Craig’s tenure as the character, which was in many ways much more grounded than some of the earlier entries in the franchise, the super spy has managed to survive many things that would have seen him perish ten times over in the real world. By blowing Bond to kingdom come, it seems that the certainty of his death was beyond any doubt.

At least until the words “James Bond Will Return” appear at the end of the credits and you know that means that when we next see Bond it will not just be a new actor, but a completely new iteration of him even more than when actors have previously passed on the mantle. Whether this means a complete sweeping of house, with new actors also brought in for supporting roles such as Q, M and Moneypenny, perhaps with a much younger Bond, we can only wait to find out as the hunt for the next James Bond commences this year.

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