No Time to Die concludes with James Bond making the ultimate sacrifice, dying in a hail of missile fire in order to ensure Safran's biological weapon doesn't escape out into the world. Moments before his death, 007 is poisoned and learns that touching the woman he loves - and his daughter - would spell doom for them. It's a tragic ending, but one that worked wonderfully in the movie.
"In my first meeting with Daniel [Craig] and the producers, they said that’s how they wanted the story," director Cary Joji Fukunaga tells Empire Online. "They felt that was an ending. I was like, ‘Well, it’s a result of an ending, but we don’t know what happens. It has to be earned.’"
While Craig's tenure as Bond has definitely ended, we are expecting another actor to play the character in an upcoming reboot. Fukunaga notes that when it came to wrapping up the story of this version, he wanted to make sure 007's death was a definitive one. "I wasn’t trying to be obtuse with it. I wanted to be clear with it. But I wanted it to be tasteful," the filmmaker explains. "We didn’t want that shot in Terminator 2 where you see Sarah Connor turning into bones."
"But we wanted to show that he wasn’t going to jump down a sewer at the last second. So that wider shot of the island being pummelled was a mixture of macro and micro. The full effect is, ‘Yes, he’s gone, but he succeeded in making sure none of that weapons would go on into the future.’"
After M, Q, Moneypenny, and Nomi all pay their respect to the fallen spy, we catch up with Madeleine and Mathilde as the former tells her little girl about James Bond. For Fukunaga, that felt like the perfect ending. "It felt like closure, like closing off the past, and closing off the story. It’s that last sentence in a paragraph in the last chapter of a book, just to try to make it feel satisfying."
No Time to Die is one heck of a blockbuster and a great sendoff for Craig's Bond. As for what comes next, that remains to be seen, though the belief is a new James Bond will be named next year. Henry Cavill remains a fan-favourite choice, as do Richard Madden and Regé-Jean Page.