‘James Bond 25’ Delayed Until April 2020

Daniel Craig as James Bond
James Bond fans will have to wait a little longer to see the return of their favourite secret agent on the big screen, as Bond 25 has been pushed back by two months.

 

Daniel Craig’s next outing as 007 was originally pinned for release on Valentine’s Day 2020, but after the recent change in director and some worrying issues with the script, MGM Studios has decided to push back the film until April that year.

 

Cary Fukunaga (True Detective, Beasts of No Nation) has taken over from Danny Boyle as director, while Scott Z. Burns has been brought in to do some significant rewrites on the script. Burns’ main writing credits include The Bourne Ultimatum and Contagion among others, but he is also seen as the best man in Hollywood to turn to when a script is in dire need of fixing. He has done uncredited work patching up scripts for some pretty major movies, including The Bourne Supremacy, Ocean’s Twelve, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

 

Whatever rewrites need doing, they’ll have to be sorted quickly. James Bond’s 25th film is scheduled to begin shooting on March 25. Most big budget films tend to be released roughly a year after shooting commences, so MGM must have felt that the eleven-month time-frame from then until February 2020 was too tight a deadline. Pushing Bond 25 back to April gives the production a little extra breathing room, especially if the script really is as problematic as it’s been reported.

 

This will be the first James Bond film to premiere outside of the Fall window since Licence to Kill back in 1989. That film, starring Timothy Dalton as 007, released in July, right in the middle of the traditional summer blockbuster season. However, it is becoming increasingly common for big budget films to release earlier in the year. April is a particularly common month for these kinds of releases. Marvel released Avengers: Infinity War in April 2018, and is set to release Avengers: Endgame in April 2019, while Warner Bros. plan to debut Shazam! a few weeks earlier in the same month as well. The trend marks a change in Hollywood, as the big studios realize the benefits of not squeezing all their films into the same 3-month period.

 

Daniel Craig is set to return for what is expected to be his final outing as James Bond before hanging up his Walther PPK once and for all. Lea Seydoux will reprise her role from Spectre, while Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw also set to return as M and Q respectively.

 

James Bond 25 will be released on April 8, 2020.