With another six months before he can finally step away from the role of James Bond, No Time to Die star Daniel Craig told The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that his advice for the next actor to step into the iconic role is simple: don’t f–k it up. Craig, who has appeared in five Bond movies since 2006’s Casino Royale, said before No Time to Die that this film would be his final outing as the super-spy. The film had been delayed from April of this year until November, and it’s possible that when he was being booked on The Tonight Show it wasn’t yet known that the movie would get delayed again.
The current plan is to release the film next April. The announcement came earlier this week, the first in a series of delays that have once again thrown Hollywood’s release schedule into chaos. In spite of all that chaos, though, Craig’s deadpan delivery of advice for his successor is he essence of simplicity.
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“Don’t f–k it up,” Craig said. “It’s a beautiful, amazing thing. Leave it better than when you found it.”
With 2020’s major releases almost all pushed until 2021 at this point, it is also creating a logjam, with the alread-crowded 2021 schedule constantly shifting to accommodate 2020’s latest crisis. Earlier today, Universal delayed Jurassic World: Dominion by a full year, pushing it from June 2021 until June 2022, likely indicating that they don’t think things will be fully back to normal until at least June.
Jurassic World: Dominion was one of the first major productions to go back to filming after restrictions started to be lifted during the most dangerous months of the pandemic. The film boasted of its on-set safety standards, but it isn’t regulations or production that is holding its release back at this point. Rather, it’s difficult to know when a movie that needs to make several hundred million dollars in order to turn a profit, might realistically open in the U.S. and hope to attract that kind of crowd.
With cinemas around the country shutting back down, another increase in nationwide coronavirus infections in the United States, and no clear end in sight to the panemic in the country that represents a huge chunk of the global box office, studios are hedging their bets. Yesterday, Warner Bros. moved a number of its biggest movies back to later in 2021 all the way through 2023 for the Shazam! sequel. And as big movies are moved, creating a bottleneck where other big movies were already scheduled, the overall release slate remains in flux.
