If everything had been going according to plan, we probably would have spent a lot of time on CinemaBlend this week talking about James Bond. No Time To Die was supposed to be released this past Friday, so we would have seen the end of Daniel Craig's time as the super spy, and we'd be breaking down what happened, and what it could mean for the future of the franchise.
Alas, it was not to be. No Time To Die was the first major release to push back its opening in response to the global pandemic and that means we're back to playing the waiting game. It seems we have a bit more time to die that we previously thought. On the plus side, there's still plenty of material that can be used to keep us excited while we wait until the film's new November release. The official James Bond Instagram dropped an image of Daniel Craig in conversation with director Cary Fukunaga on the set of M's office.
It's a simple image that certainly doesn't show us anything we haven't seen before, but considering we were expecting to have an entire movie at this point, we'll take what we can get. Clearly Daniel Craig has something to say here and director Cary Fukunaga is listening. From all reports, these two had a solid relationship on set, even though this was the director's first project with Craig and James Bond.
It was early March when No Time To Die made the decision to hold off on release until November. At the time, coronavirus wasn't a problem everywhere. However, the feeling was that it was enough of a problem in enough places, that the movie, which has a lot of international appeal, would suffer at the global box office because of theater closures in places like China. We still fully expected movie theaters to be open in April domestically, though that didn't end up working out either.
No Time To Die ended up leading the pack as all the other major film releases scheduled for April and beyond would postpone their release. Many have now been rescheduled for mid-summer or later, other are still just sitting in limbo with no release date, waiting to see when things actually start to get back to normal.
At this point, it feels like the new November release date is safe, although, at this point, it's hard to be sure of anything. Cinemark, one of the nations largest theater chains, seems to be putting together a plan that would reopen theaters on July 1, though certainly time will tell if that's truly going to work out.
Certainly, the competition in the theater business won't want to be opening any later than the other theaters for fear of losing business, so it seems likely that if one theater chain really is ready to open July 1, the others will be there in short order.
