The stunning, norm-breaking, and shocking ending of the latest James Bond adventure, No Time to Die, concluded Daniel Craig’s tenure as the famed British spy by killing Bond off explosively and dramatically, and that could lead to difficulty in ever killing off the character again. With the franchise handing the martini, tux, and Aston Martin to its next actor-to-be, though, such a maneuver might be near-impossible to pull off in the future. In many ways, the latest Bond film has made killing James Bond a difficult proposition.
In No Time to Die, Bond’s death came about from many factors that had formed over the course of Craig’s Bond tenure. Bond’s willingness to protect his lover Madeleine Swann (introduced in Spectre) and their daughter Mathilde at all costs, avenging his prior loss of Vesper in Casino Royale, resulted in a horrible cost to Bond’s life. As such, when Bond confronted the villain of the film, Lyutsfier Safin, for the final time, he was infected with a vial of the nanobot weapon Heracles intended to kill Madeleine and Mathilde whilst being mortally wounded in the process. Combined with a missile strike on the island producing Heracles where Bond was ordered by both M and Bond, Bond’s demise was all but assured.
No Time to Die killing Bond was a move that had been openly discussed and considered since the beginning of Craig’s time playing the character, and for a franchise that had been going on for nearly sixty years beforehand, it was a bold choice. The very nature of Bond in many of the films the character had starred in beforehand was to stare death in the eye from villains and perilous situations and escape it. As always, James Bould would return. Going against that would alter the course of the series forever, and when it happened, it may easily have been a one-trick pony maneuver for the legendary spy. To kill Bond again in the future, the stars will need to be successfully and similarly aligned to ensure that such a death would be thematically appropriate and meaningful.
However, the mainly episodic nature of the Bond series before Craig’s tenure, with film-to-film villains, romantic flings, and a comic and bombastic tone, would not work for a moment of this magnitude. If the series returns to this era once the next actor is introduced, No Time to Die’s ending will still loom very large. With audiences already having seen a character once thought to be the invincible super spy of the silver screen get vaporized before their very eyes, it would be a tough sell to have it happen again without an emotional buildup and story arc leading up to it beforehand.
In addition, No Time to Die drew upon many moments of the Bond film series and books out of the norm to inform its climax and Bond’s demise, something that while the series had readily done before, it had done in an age well before film analysis and long-winded Twitter threads doing so. While future Bond films could recall both On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s tragic love affair and the brutal confrontation with Blofeld (complete with a Poison Garden) in “You Only Live Twice” that author Ian Fleming initially wanted to be the death of Bond, doing so in the films right after No Time to Die could be readily seen as repetitive and cheap. The adjacent deaths of iconic characters in Avengers: Endgame and Logan might make killing Bond again even more repetitive.
However, the idea of killing James Bond again in the aftermath of No Time to Die is not an entirely impossible idea to pursue. Like its British counterpart Doctor Who, the Bond series has been readily able to evolve with the changing times, styles, and entertainment industry around it. As such, if No Time to Die was able to be informed so directly by a James Bond film that had come out 52 years beforehand, then perhaps the drastic move of killing Bond could easily be replicated again when No Time to Die is perhaps as nostalgic and fondly remembered as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is today.
