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Bond or bust: why cinemas are banking on No Time To Die

Screen saviours: Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas - Film Stills
Screen saviours: Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas - Film Stills

“If we don’t do this there will be nothing left to save,” declares Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the most recent trailer for No Time To Die.

Bond is holding a machine gun and wearing a rather scruffy looking vest as he says this. And he appears to be referring to a complicated plot involving new nemesis Safin (Rami Malek under layers of prosthetic acne) and the death of “millions”.

But the line has taken on double-edged meaning as the countdown to Bond 25’s belated arrival at multiplexes intensifies. If No Time To Die doesn’t fulfil its November 12 UK release date – November 20 in the US – there really may be no cinema industry left to save.

Tenet, the Christopher Nolan brain-bender that was supposed to administer to cinemas a pandemic pick-me up, has essentially crashed and burned (and sent us all away confused and wondering why we couldn’t make out the dialogue). So it truly is starting to look like Bond or bust at the British box office.

Bond, oddly, stands to be a beneficiary of the government’s new anti-Covid restrictions. A ramping up of safety measures is obviously news nobody wanted. However, cinemas will at least be exempt from the new 10pm curfew – provided the screening starts at 9.59 pm or earlier (alcohol obviously can’t be served post-10pm). Thus 007 remains on course to swing to the rescue of a sector that has borne the brunt of the lockdown.

The British box office has for obvious reasons imploded since the start of the year – on the March 22 weekend the highest earning film, Little Women, brought in just £38. Overall, takings are down four fifths compared with 2019. The sector isn’t just in crisis. With Covid-19 it is negotiating a potential extinction event.

No Time To Die is also almost literally the last blockbuster standing. Wonder Woman 1984 has been pushed back, this time to a mooted Christmas release (don’t be surprised if it is delayed again until 2021). The latest news from Disney meanwhile is that it is considering stalling Marvel’s Black Widow, having already shunted it back to November (replacing the upcoming Eternals movie)

The weight of expectation on No Time To Die was always going to be immense even without the inconvenience of a once-in-a century pandemic. The film became one of the first cinematic casualties of coronavirus as its release date was abruptly pushed back in February, when $30 million had already been spent on marketing (how all involved must regret not sticking with the original November 2019 date).

It’s also Craig’s swansong in the part, and will see him share screen time with Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw and Jeffrey Wright, playing Bond’s old CIA bestie Felix Leiter. And Cary Joji Fukunaga is creating history as the first American to direct a Broccoli/Eon Productions Bond movie.

Star power: Ana de Armas as Paloma in No Time to Die - Nicola Dove
Star power: Ana de Armas as Paloma in No Time to Die - Nicola Dove

One thing that was never on the cards was a video on demand release – a strategy pioneered by Disney with its live action remake of Mulan. That gambit has been deemed a qualified success with Disney reportedly earning $93 million in VOD streams in the US alone in Mulan’s first week (unlike box office takings it doesn’t have to split the proceeds with cinemas). That compares healthily with Tenet, which, far from saving cinema, is deemed to have underwhelmed with a global haul of $250 million (£196 million).

Financial considerations aside, video on demand would feel like an admission of defeat by Eon. The damage to the Bond brand would be immense. Imagine super-villain virus Covid-19 getting one over 007. There would also be a huge loss in potential revenues as pirated versions would start to circulate within hours – potentially minutes – of its debut online.

The really big difference between No Time To Do and Tenet is, of course, that the former has a good chance of being embraced by audiences – with a comprehensible plot and dialogue you can understand all the way through. The idea all summer was that Christopher Nolan’s loopy time-travel romp would hand the box office an autumn win. Unfortunately there was no opportunity to go back in time and ask Nolan to make a better film.

Tenet, after months of hype, turned out to be a stylish but illogical mess and poor word of mouth and complaints of patchy sound quality damaged its box office prospects. That was particularly the case in America where, shockingly, people weren’t prepared to risk running a Covid gauntlet to watch a confused-looking John David Washington legging it about backwards for two and a half hours. In its opening forthright in the US, Tenet grossed just $29.5 million – disappointing for a $200 million blockbuster, even in times like these.

High risk and low return: Tenet - Warner Bros
High risk and low return: Tenet - Warner Bros

“That's not how you run a marathon,” Jeff Bock, a senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations told Entertainment Weekly as Tenet underwhelmed.

“That's running off the edge of a cliff. You certainly cannot run a marathon in this fashion, in this climate. When we talk about a film dubbed as the saviour of cinema, it definitely has to over perform.”

That isn’t to say Tenet and Nolan don’t deserve credit. They went where other tentpoles refused by releasing in the middle of a worldwide epidemic.

Tenet was the canary in the coal mine and it resisted  taking the easy option of going straight to streaming. Regardless of what you think of the wonky storyline, the backwards bullets or Kenneth Branagh’s Russian accent – it had the courage of its conviction. Had Tenet blanched a precedent would have been set and we might not even be talking about Bond reaching cinemas. The industry would already be dead in the water.

Nonetheless, it was not a stellar triumph. Which means the critical mission of rescuing the box office in its hour of need  has gone to the man with whom it should have been entrusted all along. Bond has an added advantage over Tenet in that it is a truly global franchise. Some 75 per cent of the near $880 million box office for 2016’s Spectre, for instance, came from outside the United States.

That international dimension will prove even more crucial on this occasion, given the perception that the American response to Covid-19 has been a disaster (cinemas remain shuttered in parts of New York).

Not just about Bond, No Time to Die's product placement is vital to its funding
Not just about Bond, No Time to Die's product placement is vital to its funding

The pressure isn’t just at the box office of course. Bond has been a trail-blazer in product placement and it is believed that a large percentage of Bond 25’s $250 million budget has been bankrolled by names such as Omega, Aston Martin, Heineken, Jaguar Land Rover and Bollinger.

So Bond isn’t merely a cinematic event. It’s an international advertising jamboree for luxury brands. And these organisations can’t simply roll out a marketing campaign at the snap of a finger. They are planned months, if not years, in advance.

The gears and levers are already whirring into action. This week, No Time To Die co-star Lashana Lynch – whose character Nomi is rumoured to be the “new” 007 – appeared in a press launch for a Nokia phone.

The Nokia 8.3 5g handset will feature prominently in No Time To Die, the tie-in central to Nokia’s marketing in the Christmas run-up. Omega watches is also pushing ahead with its No Time To Die campaign. Waiting in the wings are Coca Cola, Aston Martin and Heineken – all of whom have their own Bond-themed advertising blitzes ready to go. Once the button is pressed on these there is no going back.

In other words, to press the brakes at this point wouldn’t just be bad news for beleaguered cinemas. It would cost millions in squandered advertising budgets.

That isn’t to say another delayed release is unthinkable. If the Covid situation in America continues to spiral, it is thought that Eon and its distributors might opt for a phased release, with the film potentially not reaching the US until weeks after debuting in other markets.

Bond fans will hope this isn’t necessary and that 007 fulfils his pledge to meet us in mid-November. Escapism, after all, has never been more important. And how better to temporarily forget our woes, than to buckle up and watch Daniel Craig charging about saving humankind for 120 minutes.

In the real world, confusion reigns : there are moments when it genuinely feels as if everyone is making it up as they go. James Bond would never be so disheveled. Seeing him, unshaken and unstirred, adjusting his bow tie and his Walther PPK, would be the perfect antidote to the unfolding low-level chaos. It is also the potential cure for the ills bedevilling cinemas globally.