10 Alternate Endings To 2021 Movies You Almost Saw

No Time to Die boasts perhaps the single ballsiest ending of any movie of the past year, as the iconic spy franchise finally did the unthinkable and killed off James Bond (Daniel Craig).

After villain Safin (Rami Malek) infects 007 with nanobots which will prevent him from ever being able to touch Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) or his daughter Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet), Bond kills Safin and decides he'd rather die than go on without having his family in his life.

And so, Bond makes no effort to escape the impending missile salvo which destroys Safin's nanobot factory while also obliterating him. It's a brutal ending but an extremely satisfying and affecting one.

After the dust following its release cleared, director and co-writer Cary Joji Fukunaga confirmed that the decision to kill Bond was made early on in the development process, though it was a good while later before they finally settled on the precise method of his death.

In an interview with Variety, Fukunaga mentioned two alternate death scenarios for Bond, namely exploding in a rocket and being shot out of nowhere. Of the latter, he expanded:

"A bullet, like an anonymous bullet, I remember that one. But it just seemed like a conventional weapons death didn't seem appropriate. Given how much he had been able to escape from everything else, the fact that it would just be a bullet that always had your name on it from the beginning, as a sort of the thematic element seemed, while realistic, for Bond it had to be something even beyond that - like the impossible, impossible situation."

It's tough to argue with the logic here - a lot of fans would've been extremely disappointed by Bond simply being shot to death, compared to the more heightened and extreme nature of his demise in the final film.