When Spectre debuted back in 2015, most viewers saw an unforgettable chase through Rome and a silver Aston Martin DB10 plunging into the Tiber. What almost nobody realized is that this sequence alone meant sacrificing most of the DB10s ever built and blowing through a car budget that would make even a billionaire blink.

A one-off Aston built to be sacrificed

Aston Martin’s DB10 wasn’t a normal supercar pulled from a showroom. It was created exclusively for Spectre as a kind of rolling concept car, designed by Aston’s Marek Reichman in collaboration with director Sam Mendes, with just 10 units ever built for production.

Unlike a regular production model, each DB10 was a bespoke prototype: hand-built, based on a modified V8 Vantage chassis, featuring a 4.7-litre V8 engine and a body designed as a preview of Aston’s next design language. They weren’t road legal, they weren’t destined for wealthy customers, and they existed for one purpose: to play Bond’s car and then, in many cases, die for the camera.

According to the British brand, all ten DB10s were constructed purely for the film and its production. Some were “hero” cars for close-ups, some were set up for stunts, and a handful were built just to be destroyed in spectacular fashion.

How seven out of ten cars became $37 million of twisted metal

Here’s where the numbers get wild. Stunt coordinator Gary Powell has said the Spectre team “set the record for smashing up cars,” with seven DB10s wrecked during filming. That means 70% of the world’s DB10 population was deliberately written off for a few minutes of screen time.

Fortune reported that the production destroyed around $37 million worth of Aston Martins while making Spectre, with a focus on the DB10 fleet built for the movie. Other outlets put the wider “car destruction” bill (including Jaguars, Land Rovers, and other vehicles) at roughly £24 million, which converts to a similar figure in dollars at 2015 exchange rates.

That means each Aston Martin DB10 built for cinema’s most famous spy, a character forever linked with high-stakes poker tables; roulette wheels; slots and other casino games as much as with fast cars, effectively cost around $3.7 million per car. And all that money went into a non-road-legal supercar, so not even Daniel Craig himself could drive it to a film premiere or a real-life casino.

Later, the market showed just how valuable survivors were. When one of the two “show” DB10s went to auction in 2016, it fetched approximately $3.5 million, despite being sold as a display piece. That price tag backs up the idea that destroying seven of them was like setting fire to a small collection of hypercars.

Put another way: car-related destruction alone accounted for something like 8% of the film’s total budget, which has been estimated at around £200 million. Most blockbusters spend heavily on CGI; Spectre poured an unusually large chunk of its money into very real, very expensive metal.

For audiences, all that cash shows up as a brief, breathtaking chase and the satisfying sight of Bond’s Aston screaming through Rome before disappearing into the river. Behind the scenes, though, it meant accepting that dozens of highly skilled engineers would spend months building what were, effectively, multimillion-dollar disposable props, and that the world’s rarest Aston Martins would exist for just long enough to be destroyed in style.