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.Callum Turner in ‘One Night Only’ and Jacob Elordi in ‘The Dog Stars’ (Universal/Disney)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. He was coming off Matthew Vaughn’s celebrated crime thriller Layer Cake, and had earned plaudits for his roles in Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition and the British indies The Mother and Enduring Love. His only major American blockbuster role had occurred five years earlier, playing Lara Croft’s love interest in the Angelina Jolie vehicle Tomb Raider – and, whatever the quality of the movie itself, that had at least made bank at the box office. The Craig of 2005 sizzled. Elordi and Turner are suddenly lukewarm.The other issue at play this weekend is that both The Dog Stars and One Night Only let their leading men down. Ridley Scott, with all due respect, is no longer an actor’s director – now 88, he shoots with multiple cameras at once while watching them all from a nearby trailer. It means his films are shot incredibly fast, and actors become mere cogs in a wider machine – Josh Brolin, who co-leads The Dog Stars, admitted to wanting to quit the movie when he found out about Scott’s process, though eventually came around to it (or so he says). Brolin, a dab hand at gruff and sensitive, acquits himself fine in The Dog Stars, but Elordi – a less experienced actor at all of this – seems a bit lost. His lips are cast in a perpetual model pout, and his attempts at downbeat, end-of-the-world melancholy register more as sleepiness. You wish someone could have leapt on set to shake some life into him. You could argue that, on paper, The Dog Stars – and its tale of a haunted loner surveying exotic landscapes armed with a gun – might have been seen as a Bond audition. That Elordi just doesn’t work here should be cause for concern.Turner, too, just doesn’t have the charisma to sell a romantic comedy. He’s the least of One Night Only’s problems, the biggest being that its entire premise – singles desperately trying to find someone to shack up with on the one night of the year where pre-marital sex is allowed – is so bananas that it’s deeply unfunny. There’s a reason Meg Ryan never starred in a romcom about fascist police states, you know? But Turner can’t charm his way out of a bad script, and there’s a plodding blandness to his performance here when what it required was something a bit more sprightly.Anthony Boyle, Patrick Gibson, Jack Barton and Jack Lowden are among the men recently linked to the Bond role (Getty Images/iStock)Looking at the landscape of likely Bond contenders right now, it makes sense that Lowden and Barton seem to be sudden favourites. Lowden is only vaguely famous, his most high-profile credit being the celebrated Apple TV series Slow Horses. Barton, meanwhile, is entirely – and fascinatingly – untested, his biggest film role to date being a tiny appearance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Neither actor has any real baggage to withstand. Jack O’Connell – another actor linked with the part lately – is in a similar boat, having recently starred in a run of movies that allowed him to really shine, from his turn as the villain of Ryan Coogler’s massive Sinners, to his role as a Jimmy Savile-aping psychopath in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later.Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.The role of James Bond is so embedded in the global psyche – and particularly in the UK – that no single actor will satisfy everyone, since we all have ideas about the kind of man who “should” be 007. Famously even Craig was lambasted shortly after he was cast, The Mirror headlining their casting-announcement cover story “The name’s Bland – James Bland”, and one TV commentator at the time describing Craig as looking “more like a banker than James Bond”. But between The Dog Stars and One Night Only, it’d be incredibly easy for observers to pull up box office receipts and bad reviews as evidence that Elordi and Turner have been massively miscast, or have limited audience appeal as leading men. Amazon has bet big on the Bond franchise, paying $20m for the character rights last year and setting plans in motion for a vast universe of 007-related projects. Can they really afford to get this wrong?‘The Dog Stars’ and ‘One Night Only’ are in cinemas