MGM and Eon Productions’ No Time to Die has come to represent something greater than just simply Daniel Craig’s final turn in the tuxedo.Say what you will about Tenet, but No Time to Die‘s long path and long wait to the big screen serves as a symbol of the survival of theatrical releases; a rising phoenix for that sector of the motion picture industry which has not only been encroached upon by streaming, but saw movies theaters completely go dark during the pandemic in 2020 though the onset of 2021.Bond 25 was the first major studio movie to have the foresight to sidestep the pandemic, as Deadline first told you; a distribution maneuver which many rival studios feared attempting back in March 2020, and even denied they’d emulate before exhibition around the globe was forced to closed.
No Time to Die is one of some hundred-plus titles that opted to stay true to a theatrical release, waiting for movie theaters to come back, refusing to be exploited as merely in-home entertainment for any streamer that tried to get their paws on the pic.
Bond may have survived the Cold War, but No Time to Die thwarted off streaming offers and a plan that would have crunched its theatrical window to a matter of days before debuting on PVOD.
As the second-highest grossing movie of the pandemic at $774M WW, no one has any regrets over how Bond’s hand was played.“We believe in the power of the theatrical release and the cinema, and that’s what we’ve always done, and that’s what Bond has always done, and we cannot agree to go PVOD, not only just for the health of our brand and our movie but we can’t do that to the cinema industry,” No Time to Die and Bond franchise producer Barbara Broccoli told us about having Bond 25 stick to its theatrical
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