No Time to Die: James Bond Director Confirms Alternate Ending Ideas

No Time To Die hit theaters back in October, and it marked Daniel Craig’s fifth and final movie as James Bond. As Craig said goodbye to the character, something huge occurred onscreen that’s never happened in a Bond movie before. Warning: Spoilers Ahead! At the end of No Time To Die, Craig’s Bond sacrificed himself, making him the first Bond in history to die. Craig and director Cary Joji Fukunaga recently spoke with Variety about the movie’s shocking ending and revealed some serious and some not-so-serious alternate endings for Bond.

“Blowing him up in a rocket,” Fukunaga replied when asked about other ways Bond might have died. “Bad oyster!,” Craig joked. Fukunaga added, “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.”

“I think the important thing was that we all try to create a situation of tragedy,” Craig explained. “The idea that there’s an insurmountable problem, there’s a greater force at play, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. And the greater force being Savin’s weapon. And that it [kills] the only thing that Bond wants in life, is to be with the people he loves and that he can’t be with them, and therefore, there’s nothing worth living for. And he would in fact endanger their lives, and that’s the last thing on earth he wants to do. So that element was incredibly important to sort of thread in there, because it couldn’t feel like a random act. It had to have weight – without it, it wasn’t gonna work. And if we hadn’t have got that weight, I don’t think we would’ve done it. We would’ve found another way of ending it.”

Last month, Craig appeared on No Time To Die: The Official James Bond Podcast, and talked about the movie’s ending. 

“There were lots of different ideas that came and went and some of it stuck. The through-line of this is family [and] love, plus the fact we had an end so it was about hanging the film off that,” Craig explained. He went on to describe the movie’s ending as “really very, very satisfying.”

No Time To Die is now available on VOD, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K.