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New Report Reveals Top Actors for the Next James Bond

The next movie already has a director and writer; all that’s left is figuring out Bond

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on August 26, 2026

Screenshot: MGM

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Screenshot: MGM

The quest to find the next James Bond remains ongoing, with Amazon MGM Studios and Denis Villeneuve, who is already on board to direct the next 007 film, looking at actors across the U.K. for the part.

According to Page Six, the studio is holding screen tests for the following actors sometime in September: Jack Barton (Heartstopper), Jacob Elordi (Euphoria), Paul Mescal (Gladiator II), Callum Turner (One Night Only, Neuromancer), Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness).

The Playlist said their reporting backs up this list, but that four are being more seriously considered than others: Barton, Lowden, Turner, and a fourth not on the Page Six list. That contender, Jack O’Connell, is familiar to you if you’ve seen Sinners or 28 Years Later.

The decision on who will take up the super spy mantle after Daniel Craig, however, is still unclear at this point. Will one of these actors take on the iconic role? Or will someone else not on this list secure the spot?

What we do know about the next movie, however, is that along with Villeneuve directing, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight will be writing the script. Villeneuve has also been eager to helm a Bond film for years. “Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007,” he said in a statement when Amazon MGM announced his attachment to the franchise. “I grew up watching James Bond films with my father, ever since Dr. No with Sean Connery. I’m a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he’s sacred territory. I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honor.”

No news on when we’ll finally learn who the next Bond will be, or when the film will go into production. [end-mark]

The post New Report Reveals Top Actors for the Next James Bond appeared first on Reactor.

Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now.

“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”

As Ars reported in December 2025, Coates and his coterie believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company's name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned.

Musk’s decision, they claim, created the opening for Operation Bluebird to claim Twitter’s trademarks.

But Musk’s X Corporation quickly sued Operation Bluebird late last year and asked a federal judge in Delaware to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent a new version of Twitter from launching.

However, in an April 2026 hearing, US District Court Judge Colm Connolly gave a tentative ruling from the bench that X seemed to have given up intellectual property claims over the word "tweet" and the Twitter bird logo—and possibly even on the word “Twitter” as well. The judge has yet to issue a written order.

For Coates, who serves as Twitter’s new general counsel and previously worked in the same role during the pre-Musk era, the judge’s words were enough to serve as a green light.

“It’s our opinion that X has abandoned its rights on the Twitter and tweet trademarks,” he said.

Still, the new Twitter takes great pains to put daylight between itself and the previous iteration of Twitter.

“Operation Bluebird, Inc. picked up the name X Corp. walked away from and is rebuilding it on trust, in your browser at twitter.now,” it states prominently on its website. “We are not X, and we are not affiliated with X Corp.”

Neither the X Corporation, nor Elon Musk, nor Andrew Mayo, one of X’s attorneys, immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

Twitter.now, still in its nascent stage, only has hundreds of users for the time being. The social media network looks and feels much like the Twitter of old and many of its offshoots—it has replies and retweets.

Fact-checking feature

A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.

Coates has been testing Vera in recent days by posting obviously false messages, like “George Washington was our second president.”

“Our first goal is to see if we can truly bring back a town square that’s safer and less harmful,” he said.

“We say freedom of speech and not freedom of reach. We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that’s not financially locked into that viral content that’s harmful or inaccurate.”

Josh Gerben, a Washington, DC-based trademark attorney who has been closely following this case, told Ars that while Operation Bluebird may have a “workable legal theory” that X Corporation has abandoned the Twitter trademark, it’s not an open-and-shut case.

“I would say that there’s an element of chutzpah to do this, and they’re going to get the best fight that X has,” he said.

“It was one thing to file the trademark application; now that they’ve launched, there will be another response from [X Corporation]," he said. "They’ve really upped the ante now. It’s a really interesting escalation of the case. Go put another round of popcorn in the microwave!”

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A couple years ago, GM made waves by saying that soon, all their new cars would be completely free of Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto support, instead opting for the "Android Automotive OS" in their cars.

Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of CarPlay for basic safety reasons and how it lets you hear or send texts without ever having to look at or touch your phone, so I was not happy to hear this news. I remember when this was first announced for Chevy EVs and when it was later expanded to all their cars in the future and the resounding response was that car buyers were PISSED.

Chevy claimed they were doing this for privacy reasons, that none of your driving or phone data would go to Apple any longer, but instead it would all go to Google (who would likely share it with General Motors, the owners of Chevy).

Chevy seemed to ignore the uproar from their fans and went ahead with it anyway, and as far as I can tell, all 2025 Chevy electric vehicles shipped with the Android Auto OS and don't interface with your phone beyond bluetooth or let you see CarPlay or AndroidAuto apps on your dash.

The accidental A/B test

Honda, much like Toyota and Subaru, didn't have a robust EV research and development program and kind of lagged behind their rival auto companies on selling EVs, so they partnered with other auto brands to rebadge, rebrand, and resell versions of cars made by other companies.

One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It's a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight up Chevy. Even though the keys say Honda on a Prologue, it's a General Motors key design with a Honda logo over it.

But one big difference the Prologue has from the Blazer it is based on is this: it includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration.

The car industry accidentally did something I've always wanted to see, which was to release basically the same car under two brands and models, with one major consumer-facing difference. It's kind of remarkable how good of a experimental design this is, since the performance and driving characteristics of both cars are identical, but drivers in one model get a major phone integration the others do not.

So how did that work out for Chevy?

You can look up actual sales numbers in GM and Honda's annual reports of sales they're required to publish to investors, and here are the results for the last 2.5 years they've both been sold in the US:

Note: The 2026 figures cover January through June and are not full-year totals.

The last column on the right is the most telling. For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.

Of the total number of EV sales between the two brands, here's a graph of how many sold were Hondas (orange) and how many were Chevys (blue):

Give consumers a choice, and they'll take the best option

Drivers want more options for how they interact with their devices, and they are increasingly preferring to buy a Chevy covered in Honda badges that comes with phone integrations instead of buying the actual Chevy the Honda is based on, which lacks it.

I wonder if Chevy will ever backpedal from their choice to remove CarPlay and Android Auto? Drivers seem to be voting with their dollars on the question, and they're voting favorably in one direction on this issue.

Now that the market has spoken loud and clear, will General Motors listen?

(This post inspired by a toot my pal Pat wrote months ago that made me want to look up the latest sales figures today)