‘No Time To Die’ writer has wild idea for how James Bond could return

This article contains major No Time To Die spoilers.

No Time To Die blew our minds — and broke our hearts — with its shocking ending, which saw Daniel Craig’s James Bond blown up to smithereens. And there was no Dark Knight Rises-style resurrection, either. 007 was dead… And yet, the movie’s credits concluded with the familiar promise that “James Bond will return.” Sure, we know that another actor is due to replace Craig in the tux, but can the super-spy really come back from such a definitive ending?

The simplest thing to do would be to wipe the slate clean and reboot the continuity, but NTTD co-writer Robert Wade has pitched an alternate, and much wilder, way the franchise could continue. While speaking on the official No Time To Die podcast, Wade argued that a line from Craig’s first outing in the role, 2006’s Casino Royale, could go on to have a greater significance going forward. What if they cloned Bond?

“I think the clues are clearly there in Casino Royale, when [Vesper] says, ‘I love you, even if all that was left of you was your little finger’. That’s my theory,” Wade said. “That’s all that’s left of [Bond] and then they clone him from that little finger.”

Though this is a pretty crazy concept, Wade and his writing partner Neal Purvis have penned every Bond film since 1999’s The World is Not Enough, so they could well be invited back for Bond 26 and make the fan theory official. This would be one way to explain Bond’s resurrection, and the new actor looking different from Craig could be waved away as other genetic material being needed to create this 00-clone.

While No Time veered pretty deep into sci-fi waters with its whole gene-targeting nanobots storyline, cloning Bond would surely be a little too out-there for the series, though, so it’s hard to see it becoming a reality. It might be the more expected route, but doing another Casino Royale and restarting the canon would likely be a lot easier for audiences to swallow.

It’s already available on digital, but No Time To Die releases on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD from Dec. 21.