The longstanding partnership between Aston Martin and EON Productions is worth untold millions in advertising and exposure for the car company, even if the deadlines and production challenges suck up huge amounts of resources. It's also a core component of the Bond character (despite as originally written, Fleming's Bond was in a Bentley). However, as Bond got grittier under Daniel Craig, so the Aston element became more and more incongruous.
Aston tried to counter this by trying to become a bit grittier itself (describing the 2019 Vantage model as a 'predator' and hiring Rankin to photograph it with a wolf sitting on the roof, as well as commissioning dark and spiky imagery from Nick Knight, among others). But gritty isn't really what its customers want. They want to be international playboys and playgirls, for whom the car represents the ultimate shortcut signifier of taste and discretion.
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