NEW YORK (AP) – Filmmaker Cary Fukunaga has been waiting more than a year and a half for the biggest movie of his career, the James Bond film “No Time to Die,” to arrive in theaters. It has been a strange and surreal wait. Months before the much-delayed movie is even released on Oct. 8, the film’s theme song, by Billie Eilish, has already won a Grammy.
“I had a dream last night where Sam Mendes was there,” Fukunaga said in a recent interview, referring to the director of the previous two Bond movies. “We were on vacation on some frozen lake. He was done with Bond films. And he was like, ‘Oh, you finished one. Now you get a break.’ Then we started, like, water skiing on a frozen lake.”
“It was a weird dream,” says Fukunaga.
The fall movie season – usually a reliable rhythm and cozy autumn comfort – is this year, like much of the past 18 months, a little disorienting. On the way are movies once planned to open as far back as April 2020, like “No Time to Die,” summer movies that hope to find better conditions in autumn, and films that have been shot and edited during the pandemic.
What has coalesced is a movie mishmash – something much more robust than last fall’s cobbled together, mostly virtual fall movie season – a season that stretched all the way to the Oscars in April. But the recent rise in COVID-19 cases due to the delta variant has added new uncertainty to a time Hollywood had once hoped would be nearing normality.