It was the first Bond film made after the death of producer Albert R. Broccoli (to whom it pays tribute in the end credits) and the last released under the United Artists label.

Tomorrow Never Dies performed well at the box office, grossing over $339 million worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1997 and earning a Golden Globe nomination despite mixed reviews.

Despite M's insistence on letting 007 finish his reconnaissance mission, Royal Navy Rear Admiral Roebuck orders the frigate HMS Chester to fire a Harpoon missile at the bazaar.

Media baron Elliot Carver starts his plans to use an encoder obtained at the bazaar by his associate, cyberterrorist Henry Gupta, to provoke war between China and the UK.

Bond steals the GPS encoder from Gupta's office at the facility; meanwhile, Carver's assassin and Stamper's mentor Dr. Kaufman kills Paris.

At a U.S. Air Force base in Okinawa, Bond teams with his CIA contact Jack Wade and meets GPS technician Dr. Dave Greenwalt.

He and Wai Lin, a Chinese Ministry of State Security agent on the same case, explore the sunken ship and discover one of its cruise missiles missing, but after reaching the surface they are captured by Stamper and taken to the CMGN tower in Saigon.

Bond detonates a grenade in the hull, damaging the ship, thus rendering it visible to radar and vulnerable to a subsequent Royal Navy attack.

Bond kills Carver with his own drilling machine and attempts to destroy the warhead with detonators, but Stamper attacks him, sending a chained Wai Lin into the water.

Other actors in the film include Julian Fellowes as the British Minister of Defence; Cecilie Thomsen as Inga Bergstrom, an Oxford professor Bond has an affair with; Nina Young as Tamara Steel, a news presenter for Carver Media Group; Colin Stinton as Dr. Dave Greenwalt, an American Air Force expert on GPS; Michael Byrne as Admiral Kelly, commander of the Royal Navy task force sent to the South China Sea; Philip Kwok as General Chang, a corrupt Chinese military official who is helping Carver start a war between China and Britain; Terence Rigby as Russian Army General Bukharin; Christopher Bowen as HMS Devonshire Commander Richard Day; Gerard Butler and Julian Rhind-Tutt as Devonshire crewmen; Pip Torrens as captain of the naval task force's lead ship HMS Bedford, Hugh Bonneville and Jason Watkins as Bedford crewmen; and Daphne Deckers as a Carver Media Group PR representative.

In 1995, Westlake wrote two story treatments in collaboration with Wilson, both of which featured a villain who planned to destroy Hong Kong with explosives on the eve of the city's July 1997 transfer of sovereignty to China.

Director Spottiswoode said that, in January 1997, MGM had a script also focused on the Hong Kong handover; however, it could not be used for a film opening at the end of the year, so they had to start "almost from scratch at T-minus zero!

"[30] [better source needed] With Vic Armstrong directing the second unit, filming of the $11 million[31] 4-minute pre-title sequence began on 18 January 1997 at Peyresourde-Balatestas Airport [fr], Peyragudes in the French Pyrenees.

The plane Bond is seen to purloin in the movie was a Czech-built Aero Vodochody L-39ZO Albatros weapons jet trainer,[32][33] supplied by a British company and flown by stunt pilots Tony "Taff" Smith and Mark (son of Ray) Hanna.

[31][34] After completing work in France, the second unit moved on to Portsmouth to film the scenes where the Royal Navy prepares to engage the Chinese, with HMS Westminster (F237) standing in for the various fictional Type 23 Frigates in the story.

The scene at the "U.S. Air Base in the South China Sea" where Bond hands over the GPS encoder was actually filmed in the area known as Blue Section at RAF Lakenheath.

However, the visa was later rescinded by Vietnamese Prime Minister Võ Văn Kiệt two months after planning had begun, forcing filming to move to Bangkok.

[37] Anthony Waye says he believed the decision was caused after Vietnam's Communist government had viewed the opening credits of GoldenEye, which featured "semi-naked ladies smashing up hammer-and-sickle emblems with sledgehammers, illustrating the fall of communism.

Since the director felt that after the tank chase in GoldenEye he could not use a bigger vehicle, a scene with Bond and Wai Lin on a BMW motorcycle was created.

Another innovation was the remote-controlled car, which had no visible driver – an effect achieved by adapting a BMW 750i to put the steering wheel on the back seat.

Prolific composer John Barry was in talks to return to the James Bond films for the first time in a decade but could not reach an agreement over his salary, according to his then-agent Richard Kraft.

[44] At first, the theme song was to be written by Arnold himself, with the help of lyricist Don Black and singer-songwriter David McAlmont, who recorded the demo.

[45] There were around twelve submissions, including songs from Swan Lee, Pulp, Saint Etienne, Marc Almond, and Sheryl Crow.

The website's consensus states: "A competent, if sometimes by-the-numbers entry to the 007 franchise, Tomorrow Never Dies may not boast the most original plot but its action sequences are genuinely thrilling.

"[54] On his website ReelViews, James Berardinelli described it as "the best Bond film in many years" and said Brosnan "inhabits his character with a suave confidence that is very like Connery's.

"[55] Kenneth Turan, writing for the Los Angeles Times, thought that a lot of Tomorrow Never Dies had a "stodgy, been-there feeling", with little change from previous films.

[56] Janet Maslin of The New York Times summarized the film as "a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.

Den of Geek also highlights that "technology wasn't the only modern danger to be pre-empted by Tomorrow Never Dies—it also offers a revealing peek into the confused state of the British national psyche, which might help to explain the country's ongoing Brexit debates.

[66] Andrew Heritage mentions Tomorrow Never Dies in his book Great Movies: 100 Years of Cinema alongside Goldfinger and From Russia with Love.

Notably it includes a reference to the film version of You Only Live Twice where he states that Bond was lying to Miss Moneypenny when he said he had taken a course in Asian languages.