TheManySaintsofNewark director Alan Taylor says there's a hint in the film about Tony's final fate in TheSopranos
But Taylor also points out there’s a nod in the new movie to a certain popular theory when teenage Tony hears a story about a man being shot in the back and notes he wouldn’t want to die the same way. It is, at the very least, baiting viewers a bit with a potentially prescient hint.
“There’s just too many signifiers [in the final season],” Taylor notes. “The biggest one for me is, I think in the entire history of, there’s only one line of dialogue that has ever been played back a second time as voiceover, and that’s when Bobby Baccalieri says that you don’t hear the bullet [when you’re killed]. So the fact that was said in an earlier episode, then repeated in voiceover later, I have to go with Tony’s dead.
In the final season’s second episode, Silvio Dante is in a restaurant when a fellow mobster is shot to death in front of him. The sound drops out and we don’t hear the gunshot, just see Silvio’s face splattered with blood in slow motion — demonstrating the whole “you don’t hear it coming” idea.