The 25th Bond film would have been something different than ‘No Time To Die’ if the original director and his team were still on the project. Danny Boyle and his team had already begun preproduction before the rift between Boyle and the producers took place.
Boyle had the plans to direct Bond 25 with the script of John Hodge, the screenwriter of the thriller drama Trainspotting. Filming was to begin on 3rd December 2018 at Pinewood Studios in the UK before Boyle quit with his team over storyline differences with the producer’s Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson. A few weeks later Cary Joji Fukunaga was announced as the new director and production was postponed to March 2019. Fukunaga is also a co-screenwriter for No Time To Die. He was the first American ever to take up a James Bond project as a director.
Boyle opened up about the reason why he quit Bond 25 while answering fan questions on Empire. He said, “I learned quite a lot about myself with Bond. I work in partnership with writers and I am not prepared to break it up. We were working very, very well but they didn’t want to go down that route with us.”
Rumors say that the dispute was regarding Daniel Craig’s Bond dying off in Bond 25. Some claim Boyle wanted to kill off Bond while others say this was the producers’ choice. Death of James Bond is a fairly significant event for a film franchise that is more than 50 years old. We will have to wait for No Time To Die to release in November to find out what fate has been decided for Craig’s Bond by the filmmakers.
Mark Tildesley, the production designer for No Time To Die, was initially working on Boyle’s Bond 25 with the same job. He gave a sneak peek into what Boyle’s ideas were for Bond 25. He revealed what kind of sets he was creating for Boyle to Media and Film Masterclasses. His narrative had a Russian villain from the new Cold War era. “We had a 350-foot rocket being built in the Bond stage. We had a Russian gulag going up in the mountains in Canada when it all came to a standstill,” he said.
Also read: No Time To Die: Latest updates on Bond 25 after the Pandemic Outbreak