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Well, well, well, here's an exciting bit of news for a late Thursday evening: Steven Knight is heading from Brum to Bond. Yes, following last month's announcement that Denis Villeneuve will direct the next James Bond movie for Amazon, the iconic spy series' new custodians David Heyman and Amy Pascal have just found the next piece of their 007-shaped puzzle. Per Deadline's reporting (and Amazon MGM Studios' Instagram), Peaky Blinders creator Knight — who recently wrapped production on his Birmingham-based mob drama's big-screen debut — has been tapped to write the upcoming 26th Bond movie.
According to Deadline's sources, Heyman and Pascal's sole focus in the time since choosing Villeneuve as the man to make the first 007 feature since 2021's No Time To Die has been on locking in the scribe to pen Bond's big screen comeback. Apparently Knight — whose vast CV of hits includes the likes of Locke, Eastern Promises, See, SAS Rogue Heroes, Spencer, and A Thousand Blows (as well as, wildly, global gameshow phenomenon Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, for which he gets co-creator credit) — emerged as the frontrunner for the job in recent weeks before reaching the final hurdle: a face-to-face meeting with Villeneuve, who's currently out in Budapest shooting Dune Part Three. Clearly that catch-up was a success, as the duo — two of the most cerebral filmmakers in the business today — have now emerged as the men tasked with taking MI6's finest into a bold new era.
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As of this moment in time, we still don't know who'll be playing Bond, how exactly the super spy is being brought back after Daniel Craig's explosive NTTD exit, or when we can expect Bond 26 to hit our screens. What we do know is that if Amazon are looking to reassure fans that the future of the franchise is in safe hands, then every appointment so far — from producers, to director, to writer — is certainly doing the trick. Now the speculation can really kick into overdrive about who'll be holding cinema's most coveted license to kill when James Bond returns. We wonder what Cillian Murphy's up to next summer…