Daniel Craig will soon be saying goodbye to the tuxedo and silenced Walther PPK, as No Time To Die will be his final outing as James Bond. Craig’s tenure at MI6 has been a resounding success, winning critical adulation for Casino Royale and Skyfall and becoming the highest-grossing Bond of all time. Filling those impeccably styled shoes will be tough, so you can bet that the next actor for the role is already under heavy consideration.
In fact, “award-winning AI software provider” Largo.ai claims to have crunched various data to decide who’s best suited for the part and top of the list, with a massive 92.3% chance of becoming a more successful Bond than Craig, is Man of Steel and The Witcher star Henry Cavill.
I’ve got to hand it to the computer, he certainly looks the part. The only wrinkle is that Cavill has commitments for multiple seasons of The Witcher with Netflix and is also still theoretically the DCEU Superman. That could mean that though he’s the most coldly logical choice, scheduling conflicts may get in the way.
Other contenders are Outlander‘s Sam Heughan and McMafia’s James Norton, who have an 87.6% and a 74.2% chance, respectively, of being better Bonds than Craig. But I think this AI system is looking at the situation a bit too coldly and just crunching the numbers for conventionally handsome white British actors within a certain age range. Also, I doubt it would ever have considered Daniel Craig for the role in the mid-2000s.
But then again, the name does sound a bit suspicious. In Thunderball, we find Sean Connery’s James Bond tangling with Emilio Largo, the ruthless black marketeer and owner of a swimming pool ominously filled with man-eating sharks. Wait a minute. Emilio Largo… Largo.ai…? It’s a trap 007! Get out of there!
