The No Time To Die Stunt That Required An Insane Amount Of Coca-Cola
A lot of attention has been paid over the years to the loss of life attributed to 007. Per The Guardian, there was a time when Pierce Brosnan killed an average of around 34 people per movie. And while the role of violence in media is certainly worth examining, focusing on acts of aggression towards humans only serves to obfuscate the real, hard-hitting questions — like, "How much brand-name soda has James Bond used up?"
Thankfully, the production team behind No Time to Die has done the socially responsible thing and offered the public a sense of transparency by revealing the answer. A staggering 8,400 gallons of Coca-Cola were sprayed on the ground during the making of the film, the 25th installment in the James Bond franchise. Adding to the inherent weirdness of this statement is the fact that it was all done to pull off a single stunt.
Lee Morrison, the stunt head on No Time to Die, told Total Film magazine (via NME) that the stunt involved outgoing James Bond actor Daniel Craig's double Paul Edwards riding a motorcycle, hitting a ramp, and landing on a cobblestone street. Craig himself was the one who figured out a way to make that all happen, and it sounds like pretty regular 9-to-5 stuff for the MI-6 agent with the most hours logged in mandatory HR meetings. As with most motorcycle jumps, though, the real trick was getting the vehicle to land on the ground without trashing the stunt performer's skeletal integrity. Complicating matters was the fact that cobblestone streets have a reputation for getting treacherously slippery. Thus, the No Time to Die crew looked for reliable ways to add some friction to the road. And that's where Coca-Cola came in.
Coca-Cola helps Bond stick the landing in No Time to Die
Chatting with Total Film for the magazine's No Time to Die cover story, Morrison described the process of giving the infrastructure of southern Italy a Coke and a smile. "I spent nearly €60,000 spraying Coca-Cola around Matera," he said. "I've been spraying Coca-Cola on slippery surfaces for a very long time."
€60,000, or around $71,000 USD, bought the production the estimated 8,400 gallons of Coke necessary to sufficiently sticky-up the cobblestones, and the stunt appears to have gone off without a hitch. Plus, as Morrison later shared, the soft drink "makes things look very clean after it washes off."
Dropping more than most people make in a year on a beverage that was literally dumped on the ground also gives audiences an idea of how No Time to Die became the most expensive James Bond movie to date (via The Hollywood Reporter). There's been no word so far on how the small Italian community went on to deal with the millions of hornets that presumably descended on the city afterwards, but one can only hope that the crew washed away the tanker truck-worth of soda using an equally enormous amount of Mentos.
After suffering repeated delays in the face of theater closures in most American markets, No Time to Die is tentatively scheduled for an April 2021 release.