No Time to Die: Commercial Prospects

If memory serves, No Time to Die was the first blockbuster-grade movie to see its release deferred as a result of the pandemic--in this case all the way to late November (more than seven months after its initial release date). This will mean its coming out five years after Spectre--the longest gap in series' history apart from the span of time between Licence to Kill and Goldeneye.

Given the surprises this year has had for us all, and for that installment in the franchise in particular, I am in no mood to make predictions--but still comfortable with hypotheticals. Let us assume the release goes ahead as now scheduled, in something like a normal film market, where a comparison with that older film is actually useful. Goldeneye was, of course, a success, the first Bond movie to break the $100 million barrier, which did not quite mean what it had before, but even adjusted for inflation reversed the generally downward trend in the series' grosses since the '70s, an especially welcome development after the disappointment of Licence to Kill. (I might add that years later it seems to be widely regarded as, The Spy Who Loved Me apart, the best of the Bond films to appear between the original crop of the '60s and the twenty-first century reboot.)

No Time to Die does not have so much to recover from--but at the same time, a generation later, the concept may be that much more worn, the market tougher, while as I remarked not so long ago, if the Bond series has been borrowing ideas rather than generating them for a half century now, the ideas it has been borrowing seem to me less appealing generally, and certainly less easy to assimilate to the character. (Moonraker's sending Bond into space was wacky, and Licence to Kill went too far in reinventing Bond as a "someone killed my favorite second cousin"-type '80s Hollywood action film hero, but all that was less problematic than origin story prequels and family drama and overlong running times and the rest it took from recent action films.)

In considering all that it seems worth acknowledging that there has been a certain amount of noise over the hints that Bond will get married, and replaced by a female (and Black) operative. I have no idea how much it will mean amid all the flashy action stuff, and after all these decades of concessions to a gender politics less forgiving of the old conception (already by the late '70s things were changing, while I would say Casino Royale pretty much finished Bond off in this department all by itself), the bigger issue seems to me to be something more basic. Already by the late '70s the illusion that it was more than "just another action" series was beginning to fade, by the '80s pretty much gone, and if at times it seemed to defy it with a movie that persuaded much of the audience it was an event (because of a longer than usual span of time, because of a new concept), as Casino Royale and Skyfall managed to do, it is an increasingly difficult trick to pull off--while pulling it off seems more essential than ever to selling tickets.

NOTE: Between the time I drafted this post, and my being able to post, there has already been new talk of No Time to Die getting bumped again, all the way over to the summer of 2021. (Things are moving too fast for anyone to keep up with these days.)