When COVID-19 started spreading around the globe, No Time to Die was one of the first major movie casualties. Pushed from May to November, it created a domino effect of release date delays, including the entire Phase 4 slate from Marvel Studios. Now, the hope is that we'll actually get to see Daniel Craig's final James Bond film on the big screen as planned.
We'll have to wait and see given the current climate, but director Cary Joji Fukunaga has now shared his thoughts on the delay, and why he's decided against making any changes to the movie.
"My first movie, Sin Nombre, came out during swine flu [pandemic in 2009], and it came out in cinemas in Mexico right when the President of Mexico said, 'Do not go to cinemas,'" the filmmaker recalls. "So I had trauma from that experience, and as I was following the news of this, almost every day I was asking [the producers], ‘What’s the plan, guys? Because this isn’t stopping.’"
"I don’t think anyone could have foreseen how the world came to a complete standstill, but I did think audiences would not be going to cinemas," Fukunaga added. "You could just fiddle and tweak and it doesn’t necessarily get better. For all intents and purposes, we had finished the film. I had mentally finished the film. Mentally and emotionally."
With these comments comes a new look at star Rami Malek as No Time to Die's sinister villain: