Amy Pascal & David Heyman: Bond’s new producers

A look at the producers tasked with taking Bond into its next era, and why their appointment matters.

Pascal and Heyman are producing Bond 26 under Amazon MGM, the studio that took full creative control of the franchise in March 2025. Here, we look at who they are, what they have made, and what their appointment tells us about the direction of the series.

For a full breakdown of what’s confirmed so far, see the Bond 26 hub.

When Amazon MGM took control of the Bond franchise and Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson stepped back, the question of who would replace them mattered enormously. The series had been a family business for sixty years. Handing it to the wrong people would have been obvious immediately.

Their replacements are Amy Pascal and David Heyman, two producers with the track record to suggest that, whatever Bond 26 becomes, it will not be through lack of experience at the top.

Amy Pascal

Pascal’s history with Bond is longer than many people remember. As head of Sony Pictures she oversaw Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and SPECTRE, prior to her departure in May 2015. She knows the franchise’s demands and pitfalls directly from the inside.

Since leaving Sony, Pascal has produced the last three Tom Holland Spider-Man films, the Spider-Verse movies, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and Spielberg’s The Post. She is currently working with Greta Gerwig on Narnia for Netflix. The thread running through her producing career is an instinct for pairing ambitious directors with material that carries real cultural weight, and letting them get on with it.

She has also suggested that Bond 26 will shoot in the UK. Speaking at the London premiere of Project Hail Mary in March 2025, she was asked whether she would return to the UK to film Bond 26. Her answer was four words: “I shall be here.”

David Heyman

Heyman discovered the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997 and produced all eight films in the franchise. That alone would be a career. But what he did after is arguably more interesting.

Paddington. Barbie. Wonka. Gravity. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Marriage Story. These aren’t the credits of a producer who found a formula and stuck to it. They’re more like the credits of someone who works with directors — Tarantino, Cuarón, Baumbach, Gerwig — and finds a way to make ambitious films that also find large audiences. For Bond 26, that combination of creative credibility and commercial instinct is exactly what the transition from Eon requires.

Heyman also understands inherited worlds. Harry Potter was one of the most scrutinised adaptations in the history of publishing. He built it carefully, film by film, over two decades without losing the thread. He knows what it means to be the custodian of something people feel strongly about.

The partnership

Pascal and Heyman are not an obvious pairing, but then Broccoli and Wilson — half-siblings who ran the franchise together for three decades — were a unique act impossible to replicate. What made that partnership work was a complementary division of skills. Pascal and Heyman offer something similar. She knows the Bond machine from the inside. He knows how to protect a legacy while moving it forward.

With Villeneuve directing and Steven Knight writing, they are part of a creative conversation that will determine what Bond becomes next.

Bond 26 team

• Denis Villeneuve — director
• Steven Knight — writer
• Amy Pascal & David Heyman — producers