In the middle of 2024, a top bookmaker declared that the 2-1 favourite to play the new James Bond was Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the beardy Brit star of Bullet Train and Kick-Ass. Or, if you’re spiritually 13, Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging. More than 70 per cent of that year’s Bond bets revolved around Taylor-Johnson, the betting company declared, suggesting that few other actors possessed anywhere near as much Bond buzz as he did.
Then, like a vat of manure being dumped on your garden lawn, came Kraven the Hunter, Taylor-Johnson’s great big Marvel flop about a superhero in a furry vest. Released shortly before Christmas that year, it grossed just $62m worldwide, off a budget of nearly $130m. It was the first – and, to date, last – movie sold entirely on Taylor-Johnson’s name above the title on the poster.
His Bond chances seemed to vanish in a flash. Today, Taylor-Johnson is rarely even mentioned when it comes to possible Bond contenders, his name consigned to the big clearance bin of never-gonna-happens that includes Henry Cavill and Bridgerton flash-in-the-pan Regé-Jean Page. And while there’s no proof that it was Taylor-Johnson’s high-profile bomb that did him in, it probably didn’t help.
Which brings us to this weekend, in which two contemporary maybe-Bonds – Australian tall person and recent Frankenstein Oscar nominee Jacob Elordi, and Dua Lipa’s husband Callum Turner – are coincidentally both front-and-centre of expensive flops at the very same time. Both Elordi and Turner have been in the Bond mix for a while now, with the pair this week linked with a series of official screen tests for the role taking place in early September. (Other names mentioned included the suddenly ubiquitous Jack Lowden, the intriguingly unknown Jack Barton, and the usual Mescals and Dickinsons.) Neither Elordi nor Turner would make for bad Bonds, per se, but the timing for their alleged screen tests arguably couldn’t be worse for them. Elordi is this week fronting The Dog Stars, a grey sludge of a post-apocalyptic thriller from director Ridley Scott, which has drawn mixed-to-negative reviews so far and is estimated to pull in between $10-14m at the US box office this weekend – a disaster for a film priced at around $70m.
Turner, meanwhile, is the star of the surreal romantic comedy One Night Only, which today sputters into British cinemas a few weeks after it opened to appalling numbers in the US. After grossing just $5m in its opening weekend, its numbers plummeted 64 per cent in its second weekend, annihilating the slim hopes that it could replicate the slow build of director Will Gluck’s last movie, the 2023 Sydney Sweeney/Glen Powell romcom Anyone But You. That movie eventually became a surprise phenomenon, topping out at $220m worldwide, and was declared the most successful Hollywood comedy since 2015.
Sweeney and Powell were anointed as major movie stars. Turner and his female lead Monica Barbaro… have not been. The faint lick of flop sweat isn’t an immediate drawback for possible Bonds, but it’s worth remembering that pre-007 Daniel Craig was a nicely under-exposed hot commodity when he was cast in the part back in 2005.
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