James Bond: Pierce Brosnan stars in Die Another Day 2002 trailer

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s fourth and final James Bond outing. It may have once been the highest-grossing 007 movie of its time, with over $430 million taken at the box office, yet the 2002 blockbuster is considered by many fans to be one of the franchise’s worst. Even with Halle Berry being cast as a Bond girl, the movie was let down by a reliance on choppy CGI, jarring product placement and yes, that invisible car.

Die Another Day pushed Bond’s real-world boundaries to the limit, being one of the more fantastical films in the series. Released just over a year after 9/11, producer Barbara Broccoli knew the franchise needed a reboot with the changing geo-political climate, just as Brosnan’s debut GoldenEye was for the post-Cold War world.

Four years after Brosnan’s last film, she did just that with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. And although Die Another Day is generally considered a poor movie, it was still paid tribute to in the outgoing star’s swan song No Time To Die.

Early on in No Time To Die, Craig’s Bond is enjoying retirement. Having been fishing on his yacht, he arrives back at his beach house to find a surprise.

Inside his home, he notices a cigar stub, which seems to have been left by Jeffrey Wright’s CIA agent Felix Leiter.

The first thing to mention is that the smokeable says 1952, which is the year that Ian Fleming began writing his first Bond novel Casino Royale, at his GoldenEye home in Jamaica. What’s more intriguing is the brand of the cigar is called Delectado, which is the Die Another Day Easter egg.

Die Another Day was the last time 007 visited Cuba before he did so again in No Time To Die. During the 2002 movie, Bond used Delectado as a code when he called a sleeper agent running a cigar factory in Havana. Brosnan’s 007 was also seen smoking a cigar in the not-so-fondly remembered Bond movie.

Craig’s modern 007 isn’t so much of a smoker himself nowadays, but Roger Moore’s Bond enjoyed a cigar. And as for the likes of Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton’s incarnations, it was puffing on cigarettes for them.

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Talking of Lazenby, No Time To Die also features some great Easter eggs to his only Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The classic film’s Bond theme was Louis Armstrong singing We Have All The Time In World, a line said by Craig’s 007 to Madeleine Swann at the start and end of the latest film. Composer Hans Zimmer also made sure to include segments of the instrumental music from Lazenby’s film too.

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