In more than 50 years of screen history, we’ve all gained a deeply bedded cultural understanding of what a Bond movie title sounds like. Beyond having grown up with these films, the bit where somebody says the title of the film has almost overtaken several of the series’ narrative tropes, so it has to be good and quotable in that way, too.

You can’t say that for many other franchises. For instance, the Marvel Cinematic Universe already encompasses almost as many films as the 007 series, but its titles span from straightforward ones like Doctor Strange to the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Of Madness. By contrast, the Bond producers are caught in the unenviable position of trying to come up with new titles that sound credible, having all but run out of options from the original stories.

Like anything that has been parodied as much as Bond, there’s a risk of sounding a bit daft. If you’ve ever dropped in on a Bond-themed improv comedy show, you’ll have heard audience-suggested titles along the lines of The Man Who Killed a Golden Tomorrow or One Night in Scunthorpe. Heck, there was a whole specially shot teaser trailer for Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa in which Alan comes up with cod-Fleming alternate titles like Hectic Danger Day and Colossal Velocity.

Certainly, No Time To Die is no outlier from the various James Bond movie title generators that have proliferated online, but these are based on those same conventions. Indeed, looking back over the unused titles, the near-misses and at least one unfortunate typo that have gone into naming the previous 24 films, it does follow in the same tradition.

The works of Ian Fleming

Although producers Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had one eye on the novels’ film franchise potential from the off, there was no notion of putting “James Bond” or “007” in the title, except for overseas releases, which were frequently based around the template of Agent 007 Vs… or 007 and the… for international translations.