Prices as of August 26, 2026, 5:33 p.m. ET. Record compiled from 14 dated sources; see the sourced record file for every citation.
Nobody has been cast as the next James Bond. That is the honest answer, and it is the studio's answer: Amazon MGM's only words on the record are a May 14 statement that "the search for the next James Bond is underway" and producer Amy Pascal's August 3 line to Deadline that "the end of the year is a good bet" for a name. But the market that prices this question moved hard on Wednesday, toward someone most people typing the question have never heard of. As of August 26, 2026, 5:33 p.m. ET, Kalshi, where a price in cents is a probability, puts Jack Barton at 28 cents bid and 32 cents ask, about a 32 percent chance, ahead of Jack Lowden at 27 cents and Callum Turner at 25.
Barton is a 31-year-old English actor with a small part in Poor Things, a recurring one in Heartstopper, and a season of SAS: Rogue Heroes, the Steven Knight series (Knight is writing Bond 26). On Wednesday morning Page Six reported that Amazon and director Denis Villeneuve will screen-test six actors in early September: Barton, Lowden, Turner, Jacob Elordi, Paul Mescal and Harris Dickinson. Insiders, the paper said, call Barton "The One," found by casting director Nina Gold "as she scoured the UK for unknowns to play the new 007." Amazon declined to comment, Dark Horizons reported, and pointed back to its May statement.
Kalshi did not have a Barton contract when the report landed. It listed one at 11:40 a.m. ET. The first trade, at 12:26 p.m., was 500 contracts at 50 cents. By dinner the price had sagged into the low 30s and Barton was the favorite on a board Turner had led since September 2025 and Lowden for two weeks. Six hours, one tabloid report, new favorite.
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The Board
As of August 26, 2026, 5:33 p.m. ET (Kalshi, cents = probability; the bid is what buyers are offering, the ask is what sellers want):
| Outcome | Yes price (bid/ask) | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Jack Barton | 28¢ / 32¢ | about 32% |
| Jack Lowden | 26¢ / 27¢ | about 27% |
| Callum Turner | 24¢ / 25¢ | about 25% |
| Jacob Elordi | 12¢ / 13¢ | about 13% |
Each actor has his own yes/no contract that pays out only if that man is cast as James Bond before January 1, 2030; every other name goes to zero, and so does a listed name who is never cast. The 29 contracts add up to well over 100 cents because each carries its own spread, so read them as a ranking, not one pie. The movement: Turner traded at 40 to 42 cents in late July, fell to 22 on August 14 after a podcast repriced Lowden, recovered to 33 on August 19, closed at 30 on Tuesday, and slid to 25 on Wednesday on 4,284 contracts, his busiest day in a week. Lowden went from 3 cents on August 9 to a 37-cent close on August 10, touched 62 during trading on August 14, and has sat at 27 or 28 since August 19. The biggest recent trades: Barton's 500 contracts at 50 cents (a buyer, 12:26 p.m. ET Wednesday), Turner's 900 at 25 cents (a seller, 2:47 p.m. ET Tuesday), and Lowden's 705 at 27 cents (a buyer, 5:03 p.m. ET Wednesday). Volume across the whole board over the last 24 hours was 42,794 contracts against 858,317 open, and Barton's book is a day old at 2,098 open contracts next to Turner's 227,447, which is why a single 500-lot can move him ten cents.
What the Models Think
We also put the question to a panel of forecasting programs we grade in public, without showing them the price, only the sourced record below. Three of the panel's eight seats ran this board; the other five were unavailable on Wednesday. Their middle answer put Barton at 25 percent, seven points under the 32-cent market, and the widest gap between two of them was 12 points, from 23 to 35. All three gave the same reason: a single tabloid report naming a Bond frontrunner has a poor track record. One model listed the "confirmed frontrunners" who never got the part, Henry Cavill, James Norton, Aidan Turner, Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, and put the chance that "a named frontrunner in a single Page Six item actually gets the role" at 25 to 35 percent, "and only if the shortlist itself is real." The one that ran highest, at 35, credited the fit: 31, British, unknown, a Nina Gold discovery. So the panel and the market agree on direction, Barton is the name to beat, and disagree on how much a one-day-old leak is worth. The market has real money behind it; the panel has only the record. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.
Two Sentences From the Studio, Three Months of Rumor
Everything official fits in two sentences. On May 14, 2026, Amazon MGM Studios said, in a statement carried by Forbes: "The search for the next James Bond is underway. While we don't plan to comment on specific details during the casting process, we're excited to share more news with 007 fans as soon as the time is right." On August 3, Pascal told Deadline, while promoting Spider-Man: Brand New Day: "I would say the end of the year is a good bet. We are being really, really methodical. Having worked with Barbara Broccoli at the studio, I mean, Daniel Craig is a hard act to follow." The brief, as World of Reel summarized the trade reporting that day, is an actor from the British Isles, under 30 or close to it, who can carry about five films the way Craig carried 15 years.
Everything else is rumor with a date on it, and the price has followed the rumors. Turner, 36, led the board from its listing on Hollywood Reporter and Men's Journal frontrunner reports. On August 11 the broadcaster Richard Osman said on his podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment: "Someone told me for definite who the new Bond is the other day, but I mean that's happened before." Then: "The name I've heard is Jack Lowden." Lowden, also 36, "is definitely being strongly considered," Osman said, while stressing it was "not a 'he's definitely got it' thing" (Euronews, August 12). Lowden's contract went from 3 cents to 37 in a day. Our August 3 piece on this market argued the likeliest Bond was a name not on the board at all; Wednesday's report is the first to put a name on that idea, and these yes/no contracts now price 29 of them.
Who is Barton? His Wikipedia entry runs to a paragraph: born 1995, Oxford School of Drama class of 2018, a fop in Poor Things, David Nelson in Heartstopper, the voice of Messmer the Impaler in Elden Ring, then John Tonkin in the second season of Knight's SAS: Rogue Heroes. He is inside the age window the studio is said to want; Lowden and Turner are not. And Page Six hedged its own scoop, per For The Win's write-up: Barton is the frontrunner "or at least the one who sits atop the James Bond heap before Amazon gets to testing a small better known leading men."
The Famous Names, and What the Old Casting Director Said
Debbie McWilliams cast the Bond films from 1981 to 2021, and in late June she criticized the famous end of the shortlist in an interview with The Independent, reported by ScreenRant on June 29. Asked about Turner and Elordi: "I don't want to see any of them as Bond because we now know so much about them." Her argument was that Bond has to keep some mystery, and you cannot keep mystery about a man who is in the gossip columns every week. That is a direct case for a Barton and against the top of the old board.
Elordi carries the one documented public incident on the shortlist. In February 2024, New South Wales police investigated an allegation that he assaulted a radio producer, Joshua Fox, at a Sydney pub after Fox joked about the Saltburn bathwater scene; Fox said on air that Elordi "pushes me against the wall and his hands are on my throat," and police said the man "did not sustain any injuries" (NBC News, February 5, 2024). The outcome was never widely reported, and we found no report of a charge. He is 12 to 13 cents today, down from 19 on August 9, and he made Wednesday's six-name list regardless.
Osman's own caveat, "that's happened before," is the one this market keeps relearning. The list of reported favorites who were never cast, Cavill, Norton, Aidan Turner, Hardy, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is the reason a 32-cent favorite is a lead and not a lock.
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What Moves The Price From Here
- Early September, the screen tests. If Page Six's six-name list holds, the next credible leak is who tested well, and a book as thin as Barton's will move ten cents on one sentence. A report that a name did not test at all sends that contract toward zero.
- December 18, 2026, Dune: Part Three opens. That is Villeneuve's other commitment, and Pascal's "end of the year is a good bet" puts an announcement in the same window. An announcement resolves all 29 contracts at once: one name to 100, the rest to zero.
- January 1, 2030, the deadline. If nobody on the board is cast by then, every listed name settles at zero. Our August 3 panel priced "someone not listed" at 45 percent; Wednesday's report is the first to give that someone a name. This one settles on January 1, 2030 at the latest.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Pinewood Studios photo by David Hawgood, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0; photos cropped, toned, and composited.
Prices quoted are live Kalshi market prices as of August 26, 2026, 5:33 p.m. ET, and will keep moving until this market settles, by January 1, 2030 at the latest. OddsShopper covers prediction markets as an independent analyst: any model or panel figures referenced are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. This article does not advocate for or against any candidate or party. Trading involves risk; contracts can go to zero.
