It has been five years since Daniel Craig handed in his Walther PPK at the end of No Time To Die, and Amazon MGM still can’t tell us who the next James Bond is. At CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week, the studio’s head of film Courtenay Valenti stepped out to address the elephant in the room, and essentially asked everyone to be patient. Again.
“I know you’re all wondering when we’re going to announce who’s playing James Bond. Don’t get too excited. Please know that we’re taking the time to do this with care and deep respect.”
Care and deep respect. Right. The kind of words a PR team lands on when they’ve got absolutely nothing else to say.
The timeline is getting silly
Let’s run through what we actually know. Amazon bought the Bond rights as part of an $8.45 billion deal back in 2022. Denis Villeneuve was announced as director in June 2025. Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator, was confirmed as screenwriter in August 2025. Amy Pascal and David Heyman are producing. A dream team, by any measure.
And yet the lead role, the entire point of the exercise, remains unfilled. Villeneuve has Dune: Part Three landing in December, which means Bond 26 realistically won’t shoot until late 2026 for a 2028 release. Five years with no Bond on screen, stretching into seven by the time the new one actually arrives. That’s not patience. That’s a franchise in neutral.
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Have fans run out of goodwill? Have we left it too long between films?
The rumour mill has done the studio’s job for it. Callum Turner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Harris Dickinson, James Norton, Theo James and Jacob Elordi have all been floated at various points.
Elordi is the one that keeps coming back, and it makes sense. He’s 28, he’s 6’5″, he’s already got an Oscar-nominated turn in Frankenstein and the recent Wuthering Heights under his belt. His schedule looks surprisingly open. If the brief is “British-looking, late twenties, a bit of mystery,” he’s arguably the most obvious pick alive but not the one diehards want. Callum makes more sense if we’re being honest here.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Omega watches signing did give us some hope that it could be him, but as time passes it’s looking less likely.
Instead, we get another round of “when the time is right, we’ll have much more to share.” The time was right about eighteen months ago.
Social media hasn’t let it slide either. An April Fools’ hoax claiming Jessie Buckley had been cast as the first female Bond went properly viral, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of play. People are so starved for an actual announcement that a clearly fake one briefly passed for real news. The joke landed because the vacuum is so big.
Here’s the thing the studio keeps glossing over. Every month without a name is a month where the cultural oxygen around Bond thins out. The last film made $774 million USD at the global box office. The franchise is a genuine asset. But assets have a shelf life, and spy-movie momentum doesn’t sit dormant for seven years without consequence.
Villeneuve is one of the best directors working. No questions there. Knight writes like nobody else. Pascal and Heyman have the receipts. The creative side is arguably the strongest Bond has looked in a decade. None of that matters if nobody’s actually wearing the suit.
DMARGE’s Two Cents
Amazon paid $8.45 billion for this franchise, and they’re treating it like a fragile family heirloom rather than the biggest action property on the planet. Cast someone. Cast Elordi. Cast Turner. Cast a nobody with good cheekbones. Just cast someone. The audience will forgive a surprise. They won’t keep forgiving silence.
Please don’t cast Elordi.
