'No Time To Die' stands to be the most expensive James Bond film ever made, and its cost has been inflated by a couple of circumstances unique to the film. First, there is the £17.44m expenditure in 2018 for the aborted Danny Boyle production. Second, there are the million-a-month interest charges that the production is enduring for every month the film is not released. Between the last two accounting periods that have been publicly filed with Companies House in the UK, the cost of 'No Time To Die' grew from £199.5m to £214m. Given a year has passed since the last filing, the film's negative cost is now around £226m. At today's exchange rate, that equates to $314m.

Print & Advertising (P&A) is the cost to release and promote a film around the world. These costs will be shared between MGM (North America) and Universal (Rest of the World) and are rarely disclosed publicly, but industry estimates peg the P&A cost for 'No Time To Die' to be around $150m (some say as much as $200m). MGM had already spent around $30m before the first pandemic delay.

The lower end of these two cost figures combined - $464m - is the total revenue that must be recovered for the film to be profitable.

But the box-office receipts you see reported do not represent the money the studio collects. With ticket sales split between the exhibitor and distributor, MGM will see an average of 50% from every dollar spent on cinema tickets around the world. And this is where things get difficult for a film budgeted in a pre-pandemic world: 'No Time To Die' now needs to clear $928m at the box office to avoid losing money. No film has gotten close since the pandemic began.