Editor's Choice

After Five Years, Revisiting the Bond Film That Broke a Series Taboo

No Time to Die made history by killing off 007 for the first time in an Eon-produced Bond film, concluding Daniel Craig’s tenure.

Published

11 hours ago

September 27, 2026

Johal

After Five Years, Revisiting the Bond Film That Broke a Series Taboo

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Five years ago, on 28 September 2021, No Time to Die opened in theaters, marking the conclusion of Craig’s tenure with a precedent-breaking death scene—the first time an Eon-produced Bond film has killed off 007.

That ending traces back further than the finished movie. According to published film records, Craig first floated the idea of killing off Bond in 2006, right after the premiere of Casino Royale, and Barbara Broccoli agreed to it then. It took fifteen years and a change of director to get there. Danny Boyle was originally attached to direct, with a screenplay by John Hodge, but both departed in August 2018 over creative differences. Cary Joji Fukunaga took over the following month, becoming the first American to direct an Eon Bond film and the first Bond director ever credited as a writer on the screenplay. Phoebe Waller-Bridge provided a script revision in April 2019, becoming just the second female screenwriter credited on a Bond film, while Paul Haggis and Scott Z. Burns worked on uncredited rewrites during the preceding months.

Production had its share of drama off camera too. Daniel Craig injured his ankle while filming in Jamaica in May 2019 and needed minor surgery to keep going. A month later, a controlled explosion at Pinewood Studios damaged the legendary 007 Stage and injured a crew member. The shoot itself stretched from April to October 1919 across Italy, Jamaica, Norway, the Faroe Islands and London, using 65mm IMAX cameras for the first time in series history.

The score underwent an unusual mid-production shift: Dan Romer, hired in July 2019, departed in November due to creative differences, and Hans Zimmer replaced him by January 2020—a first for Bond franchise composition changes Billie Eilish, 18 at the time, became the youngest artist to record a Bond theme song, and the track went on to win the Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media in March 2021, then the Academy Award for Best Original Song the following year, the film’s only win from three nominations.

The film earned over $774 million globally, becoming 2021’s fourth-highest-grossing theatrical release. It also closed a chapter in Bond ownership: the film was the last one released by MGM before Amazon acquired the studio in 2022, and it remains the last Bond picture produced under the oversight of Albert R. Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson, and Barbara Broccoli.

Studio CarryOnHarry Perspective

We tend to think of franchise films as industrial products rolled out on schedule, but No Time to Die’s production history reads more like a high-stakes drama where the ending nearly didn’t happen at all. The behind-the-scenes chaos—a director swap, a star’s injury requiring surgery, a stage explosion, a composer departure—raises a simple question: how much did the film survive by luck versus vision?

In practice, this matters because production instability often shows up on screen as tonal unevenness or half-realized ideas. A viewer watching No Time to Die might notice stylistic shifts between sequences or wonder if certain character moments land with intention or accident. The director change alone typically reshapes a film’s DNA; adding injury delays, crew emergencies, and mid-stream composer changes creates a document assembled under duress rather than design. That’s worth noticing when assessing what the final film actually is.

" The film’s commercial success and cultural resonance suggest that whatever held it together—through injury, explosion, and personnel changes—held. That’s a different story than chaos.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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20 Years On, ‘The Departed’ Remains Scorsese’s Only Personal Oscar Win

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Editor's Choice

20 Years On, ‘The Departed’ Remains Scorsese’s Only Personal Oscar Win

Published

1 day ago

September 26, 2026

Johal

20 Years On, ‘The Departed’ Remains Scorsese’s Only Personal Oscar Win

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Martin Scorsese’s "The Departed" premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on September 26, 2006, and turns 20 this year. The anniversary lands on the same date the film first opened, and it’s the awards run that followed months later which still defines how the film is remembered.

"The Departed" claimed four Academy Awards at the 79th ceremony held on February 25, 2007, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. This marked Scorsese’s first directorial Oscar after receiving five previous nominations that went unrewarded. He had been nominated for "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Goodfellas," "Gangs of New York," and "The Aviator" before "The Departed" finally earned him the statue.

When accepting the award, Scorsese humorously remarked that he had won because "this is the first movie I’ve done with a plot.", according to remarks he’s made about the film. The line has followed the film’s legacy ever since, showing up in retrospectives whenever the anniversary comes around.

The film’s road to that stage started years earlier. In January 2003, Warner Bros. Pictures and producers Brad Grey and Brad Pitt acquired the rights to remake the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs from Media Asia Entertainment Group, paying $1.75 million. Screenwriter William Monahan built the Frank Costello character around Whitey Bulger at Jack Nicholson’s request, aiming for something outside the usual gangster-film mold. Shooting began in April 2005 on a $90 million budget, with much of the interior work filmed in New York rather than Boston for tax and logistical reasons, before the film’s premiere roughly a year and a half later.

Two months before the Oscars, the film picked up a Best Director win for Scorsese at the 64th Golden Globe Awards on January 15, 2007, out of six nominations total. Critically, the reception had already been strong: a 91% positive score across 285 Rotten Tomatoes reviews, an 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, and a four-star review from Roger Ebert, who credited Scorsese with distinguishing the remake thematically from its source material.

The film earned $291.5 million globally, with $132.4 million coming from the U.S. and Canadian markets., and opened at $26.9 million domestically — good enough to make it the fourth Scorsese film to debut at number one at the box office.

Studio CarryOnHarry’s take: what stands out isn’t just that Scorsese finally won, but how long the wait had been by then — five nominations across three decades before the Academy recognized a director whose body of work had already been reshaping American film since the 1970s.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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After Five Years, Revisiting the Bond Film That Broke a Series Taboo

No Time to Die made history by killing off 007 for the first time in an Eon-produced Bond film, concluding…

A Decade Later: How Split Became Shyamalan’s Unlikely Commercial Triumph

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Editor's Choice

A Decade Later: How Split Became Shyamalan’s Unlikely Commercial Triumph

M. Night Shyamalan’s Split became a surprise $278.5 million hit on a $9 million budget, with James McAvoy’s performance in the psychological thriller…

Published

2 days ago

September 26, 2026

Johal

A Decade Later: How Split Became Shyamalan’s Unlikely Commercial Triumph

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Split’s premiere at Fantastic Fest occurred on 26 September 2016, a full decade ago, marking the arrival of a film that would become one of the more surprising hits of its era. The psychological thriller, helmed by director and writer M. Night Shyamalan, featured performances from James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Betty Buckley, and would not reach wide theatrical release in the United States until January 20, 2017.

At its core, the film presented McAvoy portraying a character with dissociative identity disorder who imprisoned three teenage girls in an underground location, cycling through distinct personalities over the course of the story. Critics responded strongly to that performance, and reviews of the film were largely positive on the strength of it, alongside praise for Shyamalan’s direction. The reception wasn’t without pushback, though: mental health advocates criticized the film’s portrayal of dissociative identity disorder as stigmatizing.

What audiences didn’t fully know going in was that Split functioned as a stealth sequel to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, released back in 2000, quietly connecting the two films as the second chapter in what became a trilogy. That link paid off commercially in a way few could have predicted for a film made on a $9 million budget. The film earned $278.5 million globally, holding the record as Blumhouse’s top-grossing film until 2023, when Five Nights at Freddy’s surpassed it.

The production itself began with principal photography starting November 11, 2015, in Philadelphia, where the story is also set. Universal Pictures handled distribution, a change from Unbreakable’s original distributor Touchstone Pictures, which had gone defunct by 2016. The trilogy that Split quietly kicked into motion reached its conclusion in 2019 with Glass, which brought the casts of both earlier films together.

Studio CarryOnHarry finds the stealth-sequel gambit the most enduring part of this story: a decade on, it’s still one of the more effective bait-and-switches a studio thriller has pulled on an unsuspecting audience.

Studio CarryOnHarry Perspective

McAvoy’s performance is the film’s real draw because audiences came for a thriller about containment and stayed for a masterclass in controlled transformation. The actor’s ability to shift not just dialogue and mannerism but apparent physical presence between personalities gave viewers something they rarely see: a genuinely virtuosic turn in a genre film, where such work typically gets overlooked in favor of plot mechanics.

In practice, this matters most in how viewers defend the film in conversation. Ask someone why Split worked for them, and they’re likely to describe a specific moment—the way a personality emerges in McAvoy’s posture, the tonal shift mid-sentence—rather than the plot itself. It’s the reason the film remains watchable even after its twist is known; the performance becomes the actual story.

Yet the critical praise also somewhat obscured a real question: how much of the acclaim reflected McAvoy’s skill versus how much reflected relief that Shyamalan had made something technically competent again? The two are hard to separate in retrospect, and it’s worth acknowledging that the performance benefited from being embedded in a film that worked, rather than existing entirely on its own terms.

The lasting lesson may be that genre filmmaking’s most valuable currency isn’t surprise or scale, but the presence of an actor fully committed to the material in front of them. McAvoy gave audiences permission to take the premise seriously, which turned a low-budget thriller into something that felt substantial.