Pierce Brosnan’s final outing as James Bond in Die Another Day may have been the franchise’s highest-grossing installment ever at the time, but it came perilously close to jumping the shark through a plot that was far-fetched nonsense even by the standards of the brand, coupled with some decidedly ropey CGI.
When it came time to reboot Bond again, Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne has reinvented the tropes of onscreen espionage by giving audiences complex and flawed protagonists, so the other JB had to move with the times in order to remain relevant. The Daniel Craig era has been largely defined by a more humanized and world-weary bond with much harder edges than we’ve been used to seeing, not to mention one who isn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, a far cry from the suave and indestructible iterations of days gone by.
In a new interview, producer Barbara Broccoli revealed that No Time to Die will complete Craig’s emotional evolution, bookending the five-film saga that began fifteen years ago in Casino Royale, and hopefully bringing the star’s arc full circle by the time the credits roll.
“This film feels like a good bookend to Casino, because his emotional evolution gets to a place where we’ve never seen Bond before. So that’s pretty exciting.”
The vast majority of Bond movies don’t focus too heavily on connective tissue, something Craig’s stint has actively looked to avoid in favor of a greater sense of continuity. The shadow of Vesper Lynd still looms over his life, while No Time to Die will feature the returns of Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld, Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter and Léa Seydoux’s Madeline Swann, establishing the leading man’s tenure as much more of a self-contained series than the largely unrelated adventures that characterized the property for most of the last 60 years.