Danny Boyle Has Revealed What He Planned For ‘No Time To Die’

Danny Boyle has made one of the most entertaining Bond films in history.

Sadly, that isn’t ‘Queen Elizabeth II leapt from a helicopter to skydive into London’s Olympic Stadium.

Still, Boyle nearly made ‘No Time to Die’ – or ‘Bond 25’ as it was known when he signed on to direct in 2018. While he’d established a good relationship with Bond producers Michael G. Wilson after the Olympics short, his tenure in the director’s chair was short-lived, and he left a few months after getting the gig.

Rumors swirling about disagreements to do with tone, content, and villain choice (including the notion that Boyle was pushing for Bond to die, which we have since learned was the plan pretty much from the start and made it to the final cut of ‘No Time to Die’. Now, though, Boyle, talking to UK magazine Esquire, has opened up about his time on the spy franchise.

“I thinking, ‘Should I really get involved in franchises?’ Because they don’t really want something different,” Boyle tells the magazine. “They want you to freshen it up a bit, but not really challenge it, and we wanted to do something different with it.”

He goes on to explain his concept: “Weirdly — it would have been very topical now — it was all set in Russia, which is of course where Bond came from, out of the Cold War. It was set in present-day Russia and went back to his origins, and they just lost, what’s the word... They just lost confidence in it.”

Boyle had been working with his regular collaborator, The Beach’) to develop their ideas and one of their big inventions did end up in the latest film, albeit in altered fashion. “The idea that they used in a different way was the one of Bond’s child, which John introduced, and which was wonderful,” he says.

The Bond films are, of course, trundling on regardless, and while we’re sorry that Boyle didn’t get to bring his vision to screens, he’s seemingly content with not going back to that world.

Still, since ‘No Time to Die’ marks the end of Daniel Craig’s run as Bond, who would Boyle like to see? Turns out, he’s a big fan of ‘I May Destroy You’ and ‘Robert Pattinson is someone he thinks could make a good Bond.

As for Boyle himself, he has Hulu on May 31st.