James Bond depressed the brake in his Aston Martin, slowing the silver beast down to stalking speed. As the car dawdled outside the six-star Maldives hotel, he rolled up the sleeve of his Giorgio Armani shirt, checked the time on his gleaming $20,000 Omega watch, and then reached into his pocket and withdrew the middling Samsung Galaxy S6.

Something’s wrong with the above scene — and Bond producers seemingly thought so too, because apparently they turned down a massive $50 million marketing and promotional package from Samsung, which would have seen Bond carry a Samsung handset in the new movie Spectre.

Why? Because Bond only uses the best.

With Spectre currently making waves in the U.K., a new report highlights the fact that Bond fought off Oddjob, Scaramanga, Sir Hugo Drax a slew of offers from Android handset makers to have their devices featured in the new hit film.

In addition to the Samsung offer, this also included a Sony offer of $18 million for Bond to carry an Xperia Z4 phone in the movie. Presumably they hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be required on a Thunderball-style underwater mission!

However, as revealed in emails from last winter’s Sony leak, Bond’s creators said money wasn’t the only consideration, and that Bond should only use the “best” phone available — which certainly didn’t include the Xperia.

“BEYOND the $$ factor, there is, as you may know, a CREATIVE factor whereby (director) Sam [Mendis] and Daniel [Craig] 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’),” noted Andrew Gumpert, President of Worldwide Business Affairs and Operations for Columbia Pictures.

Presumably similar reasoning applied to the Samsung handset too, as — having seen the movie — I can’t recall a scene where Bond is depicted holding a smartphone.

Still, Android shouldn’t be too sad about their chances of not making it into a Bond film just yet. I can’t be the only one who thinks Stagefright wouldn’t be a great name for a future movie, right? Perhaps the villain’s henchman could be called Malware, for good measure.

So which phone does Bond go with in Spectre? The iPhone sounds like the perfect candidate but instead he just doesn’t use one as all after it was decided to not write the scene into the movie.

Source: FT