Bond 26 Now Has a Script. The Bigger Story Is Who Doesn't Get a Say In It.
© Luca Fazzolari / Venice Photographer
Steven Knight went on BBC's Greatest Hits Radio a couple weeks ago and got asked, point blank, whether his first draft of the new Bond script was done. He didn't say yes. He said, "I'm nodding silently." Which is the kind of answer you give when you've been told not to say anything but also can't resist saying something.
That's the headline: the Peaky Blinders creator has a finished first draft of Bond 26. But the more interesting story is the one underneath it, because this is the first Bond script in the franchise's history written without Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson holding the pen over the writer's shoulder.
For context on why that's a bigger deal than it sounds: Broccoli and Wilson (and before them, Broccoli's father, Cubby) have had creative control of every Bond film since Dr. No in 1962. That's 63 years and 25 films of one family deciding who plays Bond, what he's allowed to say, and how far the character can bend before he stops being Bond. When Amazon MGM Studios took over creative control in February 2025 and Broccoli and Wilson stepped back, it wasn't a producer shuffle. It was the closest thing this franchise has to a constitutional crisis, and Knight's script is the first real artifact of the new government.
Knight, for what it's worth, sounds like a man who knows exactly what he inherited. "It's more than bucket list," he said. "I feel like I'm doing my duty for King and country by taking this thing on." That's not studio-approved spin, that's an English writer being fairly candid about the weight of the assignment. Denis Villeneuve, confirmed as director back in June 2025, has said something similarly reverent: "Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007. To me, he's sacred territory." Between the two of them, this reads less like a reboot and more like a restoration project, which tracks given how carefully Amazon has otherwise stayed quiet.
The one place that quiet has cracked is casting, and it's Gary Oldman's fault. At an appearance on Canada's The Morning Show, Oldman said of his Slow Horses co-star Jack Lowden: "They have picked him. They have made their choice, but they have not announced it yet." Two weeks later at TIFF, he walked it back, insisting he'd only said Lowden was "on the list" among six candidates and that the "inside information" framing wasn't his. [AFFILIATE: Slow Horses Book 1 — for anyone who wants to read the original]. Whether or not Lowden gets the role, Oldman's case for him is a decent scouting report: 36, Scottish, funny, and, in Oldman's words, carrying "a twinkle in his eye" that plenty of recent Bond talk has been missing.
Knight was asked directly whether he writes with a specific actor in mind. His answer split the difference in a way that says a lot about where this production actually is: "It does make life a little bit easier if you know who that person is, but also you have to write the character, not the actor." Read plainly, that's a writer telling you the casting isn't locked, whatever Oldman implied. Read cynically, it's also the exact thing you'd say if it were locked and you weren't allowed to confirm it.
Either way, the actual news isn't Lowden's odds. It's that Bond, for the first time in six decades, is being built by people who didn't inherit the job, they were hired for it. Whether that produces a Bond worth the wait or a very expensive impersonation is the only question that's going to matter once a name finally gets attached.