Sony has been promoting their products in the recent James Bond films. The newest one titled “Spectre” is about to be released almost everywhere and we’ve seen some commercials featuring Sony’s newest flagship, the Xperia Z5, along some of the movie characters. There have been additional contests and even a special edition of the phone will be released in the UK featuring some content related to James Bond. Apparently, there’s a chance we won’t see Daniel Craig, the actor who portrays the secret agent, promoting the Xperia Z5 because the phone is not considered to be worthy of being used by James Bond.
This was reported back in April, when some hackers made public some information from the company. Some leaked emails involving Barbara Broccoli, which is a producer of the franchise, revealed that Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig weren’t too happy with portraying James Bond using a Sony phone, as the agent only uses “the best” gadgets and pieces of technology and they don’t consider the Sony phone to be “the best”. The story reported that Daniel Craig was offered $5 million to use the Xperia Z4 on screen and Sony was involved with $18 million for marketing and promotion, while Samsung raised that amount for $50 million and offered the same $5 million if James Bond was seen using a Samsung phone. On a different scenario, the $5 million would be used to promote the phone without Daniel Craig and Broccoli would get $4 million as a placement fee and the actor portraying “Q” would get paid $1 million.
We still don’t know what’s the situation, but there have not been any promotional materials that involve Daniel Craig but neither the character “Q”. The leaked emails didn’t reveal which phone was considered “the best”, but they were talking about the Xperia Z4 back then. Now the Xperia Z5 lineup has been released and even when the design has not changed that much, the camera module has been upgraded and they now include a fingerprint scanner, so perhaps those phones are a little closer to what they consider “the best”. The Xperia Z5 Premium even includes a display with an unparalleled 4K resolution. Still, no phone is perfect and the reasons to say that one phone is better than others are completely subjective.