The Release and Box Office Run of No Time to Die: A Summary View

(I have been posting on No Time to Die's box office run these past couple of months and decided to replace all those little posts with this single post consolidating the contents of the lot. Here goes.)

The 25th EON James Bond film, No Time to Die, which had already suffered a more than usually long and troubled production (with one director's walking out and having to be replaced, with Daniel Craig's interrupting shooting, and the rest already translating to two delays) was due out in April 2020. A schedule that had it slightly preceding the big rush of blockbusters coming that summer, while alarms about the pandemic indicated a massive disruption of everyday life, filmmaking included, on the way, its backers were the first to bump a major release due to COVID-19, from April to November. They ended up delaying the release yet again when fall came around to April 2021, and then from April once more to October 2021.

Of course, the pandemic was still very much ongoing that year and a half on, while the box office was, as those in the business had feared, still depressed. In the months immediately preceding No Time to Die's release films that could have been counted on to bring in a cool billion, like Black Widow, fell far, far short of such expectations, with even Hollywood's most successful release in the preceding months, Fast and Furious 9, doing only a bit better than half that franchise's accustomed business as of late, grossing just over $700 million.

Going by the same assumption of fifty percent or so of "normal" business, with the new Bond film following two more or less billion dollar hits (Skyfall blazed past the mark in 2012, while Spectre's $880 million works out to a billion when adjusted for inflation), I figured the movie (with some claim to being an event as the close of the Daniel Craig era and its story arc, but not enjoying Skyfall-like buzz) would do about the same--which worked out to a half billion dollars. And I seem to have been far from alone in thinking so.

Still, the weekend before it came out, in the U.S. at least, Venom 2 had a sensational opening weekend, taking in some $90 million in those first three days, while the international release that very same weekend saw a $119 million take that beat the expectations previously held for it (also about $90 million). Feeding into yet another round of "The pandemic is over!" exuberance to which the media has been addicted no less than governments analysts greatly upped their estimates for the new Bond film's debut in the days right before its release, with even moderate expectations running as high as $70 million and one prediction suggesting a North American opening north of $100 million, which would have been a new record for the series. The actual opening weekend gross was more like $55 million Friday-to-Sunday (and $62 million counting in the Monday, which was Columbus Day).

Far from a new record, it was a low for the Daniel Craig era (lower even than what Casino Royale made back in 2006, fifteen years of ticket-price inflation ago). Confronted with the reality of the lower number some analysts accepted that they had been overoptimistic, but others took a "Wait and see" attitude, suggesting that the Bond film would prove to have exceptional legs. There was not much basis for this thinking. The best argument those espousing this position were able to set forth was that the older moviegoers less set on seeing a movie opening weekend would eventually come out, though the truth was that for the most part they had already done so. (It was the young people who weren't bothering.) Unsurprisingly the drop was the predictable one, the movie taking in a little under $24 million the following weekend (a 57 percent drop, more or less in line with the pattern of the last few Bond films--60 percent for Quantum of Solace, 54 percent for Skyfall, 52 percent for Spectre after its less impressive opening). Going by the premise that ten days into their run the Daniel Craig Bonds had generally made between half and two-thirds of their money, with the more robust earners proving to have the better legs (Skyfall had made only 52 percent of its total ten days in, Quantum of Solace and Spectre about 65 percent) I ventured the guess that No Time to Die, which had made $100 million by that point, would probably make somewhere between $150 million and $200 million in the U.S., with the lower bound at that point seeming to me the more likely given the soft response.

Where the global take was concerned I looked to the British data as well as the U.S. data (precisely because Britain is, of course, an especially strong market for the Bond films). The film's second U.S. weekend coincided with its third British weekend, by which point the movie had made about $93 million--just four-fifths of what Spectre had made by the same point in unadjusted numbers ($118 million). Assuming that the U.S. would, as was seen in the past, account for a quarter of the film's earnings, and that lower bound of $150 million, I saw $600 million as a plausible low end to the range. At the same time working from the possibility of the movie scoring about four-fifths what Spectre did in unadjusted dollars (four-fifths of $880 million) I guessed about $700 million as the upper end of the range.

It turned out that I was right about the North American take. In its eighth weekend in North American release, with the film already out on video On Demand, the movie took in all of $2 million, bringing its total up to $158 million, and leaving anything much above $160 million unlikely. In inflation-adjusted terms that is less than half what Skyfall made, about a third less than what the comparatively disappointing Spectre made, and indeed, less than any Bond movie has made in North America since the famously low-grossing Licence to Kill way back in 1989, as the table below (in which all figures have been adjusted for 2021 prices using the Consumer Price Index) demonstrates.

Spectre (2015)--$229 million

Skyfall (2012)-$360 million

Quantum of Solace (2008)-$208 million

Casino Royale (2006)-$225 million

Die Another Day (2002)-$243 million

The World is Not Enough (1999)-$207 million

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)-$212 million

Goldeneye (1995)-$189 million

Licence to Kill (1989)-$76 million

However, if I was right about the North American take I was wrong--overly conservative--about the global gross. Rather than $600-$700 million with the low end of the range the more likely I should have guessed $700-$800 million, with the upper range the more likely. (As it is the film has already passed the $750 million mark.)

For any but the absolute top-line blockbusters that would be a solid performance in normal times, never mind pandemic conditions, which I think justify grading on a curve. If one assumes that it made half the money it would have made in normal times that would make it the biggest hit the series has ever had (bigger than Thunderball, bigger than Skyfall, with its $1.5 to $1.6 billion exceeding even the latter film's inflation-adjusted gross of $1.3 billion appreciably). If one less generously assumes the pandemic allowed the movie to make sixty percent of what it would have ordinarily then it is, perhaps, number two, after only Skyfall. And if less generously we assume that the pandemic's cutting into its gross reduced its earnings by just a quarter it would still be on par with Spectre, and very respectable indeed. Testifying to the plausibility of the more generous measures is the fact that, with the end of the year scarcely a month away at the time of this writing No Time to Die is the highest-grossing movie of the year globally (excepting two productions made in China for the country's domestic market, increasingly an outlier these days), a distinction no Bond movie, not even the biggest, ever previously achieved (with Thunderball having the misfortune to be competing with The Sound of Music, Skyfall with the original Marvel's Avengers). In fairness the competition was not what it would have been in a normal year, with movie attendance fluctuating greatly (had No Time to Die come out in April it would have done rather less well), while it has likely helped that other studios split their earnings between the box office and video--and that Marvel got shut out of China's exceptionally large and, by pandemic standards, exceptionally healthy, market. All the same, it has the prize for now, and seems likely to still have it at year's end.

Still, if an observer might grade box office performance on a curve when assessing the reception of a film this does not work where a company bottom line is concerned. Spectacular as a nearly $800 million take is in 2021 the fact remains that, with the already obscene cost of making a Bond film raised by the tortuous path this one followed to the screen even before the pandemic, the marketing costs blown on those releases that never happened, the interest payments on borrowed money and the rest, it seems the movie may have needed to gross $900 million just to break even. The movie is clearly short of that, and indeed we are now hearing that the producers may, in spite of this success, be in the red by as much as a hundred million dollars. But all the same, when all the other non-theatrical income streams are taken into account No Time to Die will likely turn a profit before too much longer, as the producers confidently move on to the next reinvention of a franchise whose salability has (in spite of the disappointing American release, at least, testifying to vulnerabilities, not least in attracting interest among younger viewers) defied the doubters once again.

Considering the franchise's future I personally see it as being on TV (more particularly, streaming) because that is simply how things are going these days, with Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jack Ryan and the rest happily shifting from the box office to Disney Plus, Amazon and the rest. This is all the more the case in that I cannot help recalling the reports about Apple having been prepared to offer $400 million for the film's video rights, and that the producers might have done better bottom line-wise to take that offer. (While the details can make a lot of difference a studio typically ends up with about forty to fifty percent of a film's gross, which coming out of a $750-$800 million gross would work out to be $300-$400 million, which they would have got their hands on a lot earlier, and before they had got deeper into the red.) Still, I can easily imagine that with nearly $800 million banked in pandemic conditions (and the expectation that this thing has to end sometime) they remain ready to take at least one more crack at theaters--especially if they can find someone who knows how to keep to a schedule and manage a budget in charge the next time around.