Sony Offered $5 Million To Promote Its Phones In James Bond

If you recall there was a scene in Daniel Craig’s second James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, where he takes out a Sony Xperia smartphone and snaps photos of the bad guys. It was a very clear and obvious product placement and apparently one that Sony wanted to continue in the next James Bond movie.

So much so that according to the leaked Sony emails, the company had reportedly offered Daniel Craig a whopping $5 million to use Sony’s next flagship smartphone in the movie. However it seems that both Craig and the movie’s director Sam Mendes resisted Sony’s offer, claiming that James Bond only uses “the best”.

It seems that Sony wasn’t alone in their offering as Samsung was also said to have offered a $5 million fee to have its products appear in the movie as well, along with a marketing budget of $50 million to promote it. However it seems that while the money was tempting, the overall feel and consistency to the movie was more important.

In a second email sent by Andrew Gumpert, President of Worldwide Business Affairs and Operations for Columbia Pictures, “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’).”

Given that those emails were sent a while back, we’re not sure what the official conclusion is to this story, so we guess we’ll just have to wait and see what phone James Bond ends up using in Spectre which is pegged for a November 6th release.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones, Rumors
Tags: james bond, Sony