Why it’s taking so long to find the next James Bond
Late 2026, at the -earliest. Maybe 2027. Perhaps even 2028.
You’re reading this because you want to know about the next James Bond film: the one that will pick up where the Daniel Craig series left off, and introduce a brand new 007. But the above dates – the British film industry’s current best guesses as to when we’ll actually see the thing, as shared with me by a senior talent representative last weekend – is, for now, about all there is to know.
There is no script, no title, not even a director – though I’m told a small number of contenders have been summoned to Eon Productions’ London HQ for what have been described as “a first round of speed dates”. No setting has been chosen, no source material selected, from the Ian Fleming novels or elsewhere. There’s obviously no singer for the title theme either, though that hasn’t inhibited the bookies: you can get 10/3 odds on Dua Lipa or Lady Gaga; 5/1 on Lana Del Rey or this year’s Brit Award-winning Raye. Most crucially of all – despite regular claims to the contrary – 007 himself has yet to be recruited. If Blofeld strikes in the next 24 months, we’re basically doomed.
Should we be worried? “Not unduly,” says Professor James Chapman of the University of Leicester, and author of Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. If 2027 proves correct, Bond 26 will arrive roughly six years after Craig’s explosive 2021 demise. And, as Chapman points out, the series has taken a similar hiatus before.
The gap between 1989’s Licence to Kill, the final Timothy Dalton film, and 1995’s GoldenEye, the first to star Pierce Brosnan, was six years, four months, 14 days – for what Chapman describes as “all sorts of complex and wide-ranging reasons”.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Bond’s home studio, was embroiled in buyouts and bankruptcy. The response to the surly second Dalton film had been lukewarm – it remains the least successful in terms of both box office return and profit margin, adjusted for inflation – and coming out in the same summer as -Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Tim Burton’s Batman had done it no favours. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the franchise’s guiding producer since the Sean Connery days, had also turned 80, and was afflicted by worsening health.
Creatively, corporately and personally, everything was up in the air – which is not so far from Bond’s current plight. Barely six months after the release of Craig’s 2021 swan song, No Time to Die, MGM was bought out again: this time by Amazon, with whom Eon will have to thrash out the franchise’s future.
Could the tech titan transform its acquisition into a mega-budget streaming series, as it did with The Lord of the Rings after acquiring the rights from the Tolkien estate? It doesn’t sound the sort of move that would appeal to Barbara Broccoli – daughter of Cubby, vivacious co-boss of Eon (with her half-brother Michael G Wilson), and very theatrically inclined keeper of 007’s flame. But when it comes to setting Bond’s new creative direction – she has talked about the next film as a “whole new reinvention” – she doesn’t appear to be in a rush. Indeed, she’s currently busy with a long-term passion project of Craig’s: a film adaptation of Othello, set in a US Army compound in Iraq.
Craig is said to have been -romancing a number of Gulf state cultural funds for backing, including one operated by the Doha Film Institute in Qatar. Given the region’s ongoing soft-power grab in the film world, it’s also possible that the first mission for Craig’s successor as Bond might take him out there, so he can marvel at the glamorous hyper-modernity of whichever nation coughs up the most. (The 2014 Sony email hack revealed that during the making of Spectre, a similar deal was struck with the Mexican government, who paid Sony between $14 and $20 million for a favourable portrayal of the country in the film.)
To be clear, this is one critic’s speculation. No screenplay exists – though an agent tells me that when one of her clients blocks out a significant chunk of time for a gig, rumours fly that they’ve been secretly hired by Eon to compile a first draft.
“This early part of the process typically has to unfold in a certain order,” explains Calvin Dyson, a leading Bond content creator whose videos have accrued more than 21.5 million views on YouTube. “When Casino Royale was in development, Eon chose Martin Campbell to direct before casting Daniel Craig, because Campbell rightly wanted to be a part of that process.”
Campbell also had Paul Haggis rework the original script, which Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade had written with Craig’s predecessor Brosnan in mind. It was a jokier affair than the muscular thriller we got, which would have seen Bond playing chess with Lord Lucan. So the director, rather than star, will almost certainly be the first block to drop into place.
But who? Wishful thinkers pine for Christopher Nolan, but Eon is almost certainly looking for another Campbell: a safe and seasoned pair of hands without the sort of distinctive personal style that would impinge on Bond’s own.
It could theoretically opt again for Campbell, who marshalled both Brosnan and Craig’s debuts with aplomb, and is still working at 80. But another name understood to be on Eon’s radar is Germany’s Edward Berger, whose reputation soared last year with his multi-Oscar and Bafta-winning adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. (His follow-up, an adaptation of the Robert Harris papal thriller Conclave, is out later this year.)
The veteran studio screenwriter Kelly Marcel, of Fifty Shades of Grey and the Venom films, has also been linked – let’s see how her directorial debut, Venom: The Last Dance, goes down this October. Australia’s David Mich?d (Animal Kingdom) has too, while younger names such as Bart Layton (The Imposter) and Yann Demange (’71) would also be plausible choices. “Any of my clients would drop everything for Bond,” an agent tells me. “Despite the obvious pressure, for all but the very biggest working filmmakers it’s a dream gig – career-changingly high profile and absurdly well paid. And who doesn’t have ideas about how to do James Bond?”
Quite: hence the steady drip of casting rumours, each feverishly war-gamed by both traditional and social media outlets, since before Craig’s tenure ended. The candidate to gain most -traction so far is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whom The Sun reported had been “formally offered the role” in March this year.
Chapman describes the story as “a rumour, but possibly an official rumour – a testing of the waters by Eon, just to see what the public reaction would be”. A cynic might observe that being touted as a likely Bond would be a handy PR fillip for an actor whose highest-profile forthcoming film was Kraven the Hunter, the latest in a series of hitherto-dismal Spider-Man spin-offs. Note the ATJ-as-Bond story surfaced a few weeks after Kraven’s forerunner, Madame Web, turned its star, Dakota Johnson, into an internet punchline. One man’s rumour is another’s pre-emptive damage control.
Besides, “One of the most exciting things about Daniel Craig’s casting is how unexpected it was,” Dyson notes. “Clive Owen was the name that kept coming up in the tabloids at the time, so it’s possible that the next Bond will be someone who isn’t currently even in the conversation.”
The level of fame also has to be right. “They have to be established, but on the cusp of something greater,” Chapman says. “It’s often said that Connery was an unknown, but in fact he was already active in television, and taking meaty supporting roles in films in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Roger Moore was closer to a star, but overwhelmingly on TV, in series such as Ivanhoe, The Persuaders! and The Saint.”
Who fits the Bond profile today? Perhaps someone like Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page, whose stylist barely let him leave the house without a tuxedo in 2021, as the end of Craig’s term approached. Debonairly handsome with a winning comic touch, he would also fit the Broccoli reinvention brief. (Not being white is no obstacle: thanks again to the Sony email hack, we know that in 2014, the studio’s then-chairwoman Amy Pascal was backing Idris Elba to take over from Craig – though at 51, the London-born actor has now aged out of contention.)
At 36, Page would be a plausible new recruit to the 007 programme, with time for multiple sequels ahead of him. Or if his moment’s passed, 39-year-old Theo James – whose starring role in another hit Netflix series, The Gentlemen, might as well have been a Bond audition – could easily pass as a super-spy in training. As would Jack Lowden, the 34-year-old star of Slow Horses. As Chapman points out, however, a conspicuously young Bond was something the franchise traditionally viewed with suspicion.
“Around the time of For Your Eyes Only, when Eon was considering recasting, it drew up some treatments for Bond as a young man on his first adventure.” But Cubby Broccoli intervened: “He thought audiences wanted to see Bond as capable and established, rather than making youthful mistakes. And it was only a decade after Broccoli’s death that they dared to give us a Bond who was fallible in Casino Royale.”
In a way, the question of how to launch Craig was made simpler by Eon having only acquired the rights to Fleming’s Casino Royale in 1999. (MGM did swapsies with Sony for Spider-Man.) That ironically made the first Bond novel the last to be raided for material by the films – though as Chapman observes, hardcore Flemingites would likely turn backflips for a new run of straight period adaptations.
But there’s a catch.
“Brand tie-ins,” says Dyson. “A 1950s-set reboot would definitely give the series a clean break. But a lot of the associated brands – the cars, the watches, the clothes – would have to go very retro with their product placement.”
In 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies and from Casino Royale to Spectre, Bond used a series of Sony Ericsson and Sony Xperia mobile phones. (At some point before No Time to Die, he apparently switched to Nokia.) And with the studio commanding a ￡3.3 million fee for Bond to simply hold an Xperia handset in Skyfall, having cinema’s suavest spy tacitly endorse certain products can be a useful means of plumping the budget. Move too far back in time and that revenue stream disappears, unless there’s an Xperia rotary dial in the works.
No other film franchise would prompt this sort of granular guesswork. But where Bond’s been and where he goes matters more than with Marvel or Star Wars.
“For one thing, Bond is the only film series to have been around consistently for half of cinema’s existence as a mass entertainment medium,” Chapman says. “But as a cultural figure, he’s also inextricably tied up with Brand Britain, reflecting the nation’s self-image.”
Chapman suggests that at times when Britishness has been in style – the swinging sixties, Cool Britannia, the 2012 Olympics – the films have resonated in a profound way with their domestic audience. And during the country’s less becoming moments – think the Iraq War, or the Winter of Discontent and its miserable build-up – our favourite spy strays into self-parody, laundering the national unease through invisible cars, trips to space and Union Jack-brand parachutes.
How will we feel about ourselves in three years? Good question.
“Bond is a product of the Neo-Elizabethan era – so the end of Empire, but still with a sense of -pageantry and patriotism,” says Chapman. “But he now has to adjust to the Carolean age – a new king, and the new national outlook that entails. I would hope the next film will address that.”
Of course, as the credits always promise, James Bond will return. But much has still to be thrashed out before he can.
