James Bond doesn’t work for free. According to internal Sony emails revealed via last winter’s hack, Sony offered James Bond star Daniel Craig a $5 million fee to put Sony Xperia Z4 smartphone in the forthcoming film Spectre, but Craig and Spectre director Sam Mendes resisted because “James Bond only uses the ‘best.”
This email from George Leon, Sony’s executive vice president of consumer marketing, indicates that Craig and director Sam Mendes met with Barbara Broccoli, daughter of Albert Broccoli who produced the original James Bond films, to discuss the possibility of product placement in Spectre.
“BEYOND the $$ factor, there is, as you may know, a CREATIVE factor whereby Sam and Daniel don’t like the Sony phone for the film (the thinking, subjectively/objectively is that James Bond only uses the ‘best,’ and in their minds, the Sony phone is not the ‘best’).”
The email is dated to October 2014, and also mentions the possibility of swapping in a Samsung device for Sony’s. While Sony had reportedly budgeted an $18 million “advertising commitment” for the next Bond film, Samsung was apparently willing to up this figure to $50 million. A previous email also floated the idea of sidestepping Craig altogether and bringing in Q — aka British actor Ben Whishaw — for the publicity instead.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything else in the emails revealing which smartphone brand Bond does decide is “the best.” He certainly has a history with Sony !
It’s important to remember James Bond latest movie Skyfall, Craig was sporting Xperia T.
James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) uses a Sony Xperia™ T mobile phone in the movie SkyFall. In a bar in Shanghai, Bond receives a text message with Patrice’s flight number. The text message, received at 19h55, from an unknown number, reads: “EWA FLIGHT 226 9pm”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywUrekw_sHQ
