Cary Joji Fukunaga, Daniel Craig and the rest of the No Time to Die team would have been celebrating wildly after it was confirmed that the 25th installment in the James Bond franchise had passed Fast & Furious 9 to become the highest-grossing Hollywood movie to hit theaters since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was released in December 2019.
It’s an impressive achievement given the circumstances, especially with the globetrotting espionage epic having been available on VOD for almost two weeks. At the time of writing, No Time to Die‘s haul is sitting at a mammoth $734 million, and yet there are no guarantees that 007’s latest adventure is going to turn a single penny of profit.
We’d heard in the past that No Time to Die needed to come close to $900 million to end up in the black, which is staggering when you think about it. Then again, costs have skyrocketed after the studio was forced to launch multiple marketing campaigns before each one was hit by a delay, without even considering a budget rumored to be north of $300 million.
As per Variety, No Time to Die could end up losing $100 million by the time it leaves theaters, and while MGM are refusing to acknowledge it, many insiders and figures with knowledge of how the business works are in agreement. Hollywood accounting is murky at the best of times, but it’s still astonishing to think a film that nets over $700 million could end up in the red to the tune of nine figures.