Day of the Dead Parade at 10: It First Appeared in a Bond Film

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Oct. 30, 2026 (Fri.)

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The Day of the Dead Parade at 10: In 2015, It Existed Only in a Bond Film

The skeleton procession coming down Mexico City’s main avenue on Saturday began with what tourists expected to find.

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Day of the Dead Parade at 10: In 2015, It Existed Only in a Bond Film — It looks centuries old, but Mexico City's skeleton procession first took to the streets on Oct. 29, 2016. This year's parade is Oct. 31. (card 1/6) The Holiday Is Old. The Parade Is New. — Families build home altars and visit cemeteries to welcome back the dead. What is new is one event: the downtown skeleton procession. — Image: 2018 parade, Zócalo · Mexico City Government · CC0 (card 2/6) A Parade the Filmmakers Dreamed Up — About 1,000 skeleton-costumed extras and 500 more playing onlookers, police and soldiers filled the opening of "Spectre." The square had a giant altar, but no skeleton march. — 1,500 extras (card 3/6) Tax Breaks for a Four-Minute Scene — Mexican officials reportedly offered $14 million to $20 million in incentives, with conditions: the villain could not be Mexican. The producer denied the script was changed. — a four-minute scene, $3.5M a minute (card 4/6) "We Have to Invent a Day of the Dead Carnival" — After the Bond film, people would come looking for it and not find it. The first parade, on Oct. 29, 2016, wore the film's costumes. "Coco" came a year later. (card 5/6) It Lasted Because People Moved In — 2017 · A month after the earthquake, about 30 rescuers in skull paint led the second parade. / 2025 · 1.45 million people turned out, by the city's count. / 2026 · In June, the city brought it out again for World Cup visitors. (card 6/6)

At 2 p.m. on Saturday, a procession of skeletons will move down Paseo de la Reforma, the grand avenue through the heart of Mexico City. Floats will carry giant skulls, and dancers with white-painted faces will weave between them. Watch the clips that fill your feed this weekend and you could fairly assume the parade is centuries old.

It first took to the streets on Oct. 29, 2016, which makes it 10 this year. A year before that, it existed only on film, in the opening sequence of the 2015 James Bond movie “Spectre.”

The holiday itself is old. Every Nov. 1 and 2, Mexican families build altars at home and visit cemeteries to welcome back relatives who have died. What is new is one event: the downtown skeleton procession now billed as the Day of the Dead parade.

Anyone who has toured a model home knows how this story works. A developer pays to build one show house first, so buyers can see what they will get. Once the buyers arrive, the developer has to put up real houses. Mexico’s model home went up on a movie screen.

March 2015: 1,500 Extras in the Zócalo

In March 2015, about 1,000 extras in skeleton costumes filed across the Zócalo, the city’s vast central square. Another 500, playing onlookers, police officers and soldiers, filled in around them. Sam Mendes was shooting the opening of “Spectre,” a few minutes in which Bond chases an assassin through festival crowds and ends up fighting him in a helicopter above the square.

In a behind-the-scenes video posted by the official 007 account, the crew says it got all 1,500 extras ready in 75 minutes, or 20 a minute. Ten floats carried skeletons; the tallest stood 36 feet, about three stories.

There was no real parade to copy. Since around 2000, the Zócalo had hosted a giant Day of the Dead altar. Since 2007, the city’s Museum of Popular Art had paraded alebrijes, the brightly painted fantasy creatures of Mexican folk art, built at monumental scale. But the look of the parade, thousands of people marching downtown in skeleton paint, was something the filmmakers dreamed up.

The Emails Before the Shoot

Why Mexico City? Part of the answer involves money. Late in 2014, hackers broke into Sony Pictures and dumped a trove of internal email online. In March 2015, the tax-policy publication Tax Analysts reported what some of those messages said about “Spectre.”

According to that report, Mexican officials offered the over-budget production at least $14 million, and up to $20 million, in tax incentives, with conditions attached. The villain could not be Mexican. A well-known Mexican actress had to be cast. The assassin’s target had to be an international leader rather than Mexico City’s mayor. Aerial shots should show off the city’s modern buildings. The report also said the sequence had originally been written as a cage fight, with no clear location. The Guardian reported that the emails also suggested Mexico wanted it turned into a chase through Day of the Dead celebrations.

4 minutes
The length of the Mexico City sequence, as Tax Analysts described it. At the low figure, that comes to about $3.5 million a minute.

A studio rewriting a script for money should make anyone uneasy. The film’s producer, Michael G. Wilson, denied that it had, saying there was nothing in the script that had not been there before. He did acknowledge that the production received incentives, as Bond films do wherever they shoot. Whichever account is right, Mexican officials plainly cared how their capital would look to audiences around the world. In effect, Mexico helped pay for the model home.

A Phone Call a Year Later

The film reached theaters around the world in the fall of 2015. Lourdes Berho, then head of Mexico’s tourism board, told The Associated Press in 2016 that the film had played to millions of people in 67 countries. That, she said, “started to create expectations that we would have something.” Enrique de la Madrid, Mexico’s tourism secretary, was blunter. The German news agency dpa quoted him this way:

“We have to invent a Day of the Dead carnival, because after the James Bond film, people are going to come looking for the carnival and they won’t find it.”

The buyers had seen the model home. Soon they would want a house. Luckily, the materials already existed. Anna Terrazas led the Mexico unit’s costume team under the film’s costume designer, Jany Temime. She assembled roughly 70 people and spent six months on that one short sequence, making every dress, suit and mask from scratch. She went on to design the costumes for Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma.”

In an interview, Terrazas recalled that the government called the year after the film came out to ask whether it could use those costumes. They appeared in the first parade. The city’s own announcement before the event said as much, promising to reuse the film’s props and wardrobe. The clothes that had dressed a fictional parade now dressed a real one.

On Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016, the first parade marched from the Angel of Independence monument to the Zócalo. That day, Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera thanked 250,000 people on Twitter.

A Year Before “Coco”

Two objections usually come up at this point. The first is “Coco.” Pixar’s film is also set during the Day of the Dead, and some families say they traveled to Mexico because of it. In EFE’s coverage of last year’s parade, a visitor from Puerto Rico said his children loved the movie, and that was a big reason they came.

The dates say otherwise. “Coco” opened in Mexico in late October 2017, a year after the first parade. The director, Lee Unkrich, pitched it in September 2011, and his team made research trips to stay with Mexican families over the holiday. Among the living, the film’s Day of the Dead happens at home altars and in the cemetery of a fictional town, Santa Cecilia, not on a city boulevard. “Spectre” showed a street festival that did not exist. “Coco” showed a family holiday that did.

The second objection is that the parade is a fake tradition. Mexicans said so from the start. On the day of the first parade, people posted on Twitter that it was embarrassing for a foreign film to tell Mexico how to celebrate its own customs. The anthropologist Gabriela Torres Ramos, in a journal article, laid out a sharper critique: a country where violence had killed hundreds of thousands was turning death into a carnival.

The art historian Veka Duncan sees it differently. The Day of the Dead, she points out, is not pre-Hispanic to begin with; Nov. 1 and 2 are All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on the Catholic calendar. So she is less troubled than other critics by a parade borrowed from a movie. In her view, every tradition was invented by someone.

Year Two: Rescuers at the Front

The next year, the parade found a different use. On Sept. 19, 2017, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake shook Mexico City and killed more than 300 people. The second parade came just over a month later, on Oct. 28.

At the head of the procession marched about 30 soldiers and volunteers who had taken part in the rescue effort, their faces painted as skulls. Applause followed them down the avenue. “Not everyone was saved,” Paula Schlaepfer, a member of the production team, told AFP, adding that organizers wanted the tribute to be more than a party. That year the giant altar in the Zócalo was dedicated to the earthquake’s victims as well. In its second year, a parade borrowed from a movie became a place to mourn the city’s own dead.

This June’s Parade

After that, the parade became part of the city’s fall calendar. Last year’s parade drew 1.45 million people, by the city government’s count. This year, the Day of the Dead did not wait for November.

On June 13, two days after the World Cup opened, the city staged a World Cup parade on Reforma and put the Day of the Dead at its center. A float carried an altar to soccer legends who have died, and 50 performers dressed as Catrinas, the elegant skeleton ladies of Mexican folk imagery, marched in the parade. Ana Francis López Bayghen, the city’s culture secretary, explained the choice: the Day of the Dead weekend is when the capital draws the most visitors. More than 200,000 people turned out.

In 2015, Mexico’s model home went up on a movie screen for the world to see. Expecting guests to come looking for it, Mexico built the real thing the next year, out of the same costumes. The year after that, residents who had lost neighbors in the earthquake used it to honor them. A house built for tourists had become the city’s own. This summer, the city brought it out again as a model home for World Cup visitors. The parade did not last because it was old. It lasted because people moved in.

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