For nearly a decade, Mexico City has celebrated the Day of the Dead with a massive, vibrant carnival. While the holiday itself dates back to the Aztec era, the parade is a modern invention of Hollywood, brought to life after the 2015 James Bond film Spectre portrayed a fictionalized version of the event that audiences assumed was real.
Before the release of the 24th Bond installment, Day of the Dead traditions in the capital were typically intimate, solemn affairs involving family altars and visits to cemeteries.
James Bond and Mexico City’s Day of the Dead carnival
Director Sam Mendes changed that landscape with an eight-minute opening sequence featuring Daniel Craig’s Bond chasing a terrorist through a high-energy procession. This cinematic fiction created an immediate “pizza effect,” a cultural phenomenon where a distorted export is reintroduced to its original culture and adopted as authentic.
The transition from screen to reality was fueled by significant financial and political maneuvering. Leaked internal emails from Sony Pictures revealed that Mexican officials offered up to US$20 million in tax incentives and rebates to ensure the country was portrayed in a modern and positive light.
These incentives came with strings attached, including script changes that replaced a Mexican villain with an Italian one, mandated the casting of a “known Mexican actress,” leading to the hire of Stephanie Sigman, and swapped a gritty cage fight for the now-iconic parade sequence.
Small businesses in Mexico City lost 60% of their revenue during the filming of the movie
The production of Spectre was not without its immediate costs to the city. During 10 days of filming in March 2015, significant portions of the historic downtown were shuttered, causing more than 6,500 local businesses to lose an estimated 60% of their revenue.
Small business chambers reported a collective loss of at least 375 million Mexican pesos, approximately US$20 million at the time. Despite the backlash from local owners, tourism officials said that the “Bond City” status would spark an economic boom far exceeding the temporary inconvenience.
It’s the Day of the Dead festival this weekend which featured in the opening sequence of SPECTRE. pic.twitter.com/VjY0x6hu6Z
— James Bond (@007) November 2, 2019
Following the film’s global success, the Mexican government faced pressure to meet the expectations of tourists who arrived in Mexico City searching for the carnival they had seen in the James Bond movie.
On Oct. 29, 2016, a year after the film’s release, the city launched its first official Day of the Dead parade. The event drew an estimated 425,000 spectators and featured props and costumes used in the movie, including a giant float of the Haitian voodoo spirit Baron Samedi, an unkillable henchman from the earlier Bond film Live and Let Die that Sam Mendes had used as a visual nod.
The James Bond-inspired carnival generated 1 billion Mexican pesos for Mexico City
While the inaugural parade earned an estimated 1 billion pesos for local businesses and successfully rebranded the city’s holiday, it faced sharp criticism from scholars and traditionalists. Claudio Lomnitz, a professor of Mexican studies, described the event as “national narcissism,” suggesting that the country had fallen in love with an image of itself reflected in the mirror of Hollywood.
Others dismissed the parade as a “cheap stunt,” and a populist pitch by a local government focused on spectacles rather than the deep, spiritual roots of the Indigenous tradition.
Despite these objections, the parade has evolved into a permanent fixture of Mexico’s “Season of the Dead.” Today, as the event continues to draw millions of visitors, its origins as a fictional set piece for a spy thriller are fading from public memory, replaced by its status as a cornerstone of modern Mexican national identity.