Today in Cinema, November 6: Spectre Opens in America in 2015 and Takes Bond From Mexico City to a Sahara Crater

Today in Cinema looks at one major film from movie history: how it was made, how it was received and why it is still discussed. This entry marks the 11th anniversary of a film that opened in the United States on November 6, 2015.

On this date in 2015, Spectre arrived in American theaters after an eleven-day head start overseas. It opened in 3,927 locations, the widest release a James Bond film had ever had in the United States and Canada, and it took $70.4 million over the weekend to finish first at the box office. That was about $20 million less than Skyfall had earned three years earlier, a gap that shaped the way the film was discussed for years afterward, even as it went on to collect $880.7 million worldwide.

The 24th film in the Eon Productions series, Spectre was the fourth outing for Daniel Craig as James Bond and the second directed by Sam Mendes. It had a world premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in London on October 26, 2015, the same day it opened in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Behind the glossy surface sat a production that contained a leaked script, a fifty-year legal feud over a single villain, a Day of the Dead parade that did not yet exist, and a stunt explosion that earned a Guinness World Record. This anniversary edition looks at how it all came together and why the film still divides Bond fans.

The article discusses the whole story, including the ending, because the film is more than a decade old.

Spectre by the Numbers

The Eleven-Day Gap: A Bond Film That Opened Twice

Studios usually stagger international and domestic releases only slightly, but Spectre played its home market after Britain, Germany and much of Europe had already seen it. In the United Kingdom, the film opened on a Monday with previews that grossed £4.1 million, then set records for both its first and second days. In its first seven days there it earned £41.7 million, which broke the record for a British opening week that had belonged to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at £23.9 million.

By the time it reached American theaters, the picture was already a global hit. Early Thursday-night showings in the United States and Canada brought in $5.3 million, and opening day took $28 million. Weekend projections that began at $70 million to $75 million were raised to $75 million to $80 million, and the final figure of $70.4 million landed at the lower end of them. Large-format screens did a good share of the work: IMAX contributed $9.1 million from 374 screens, and premium large-format and IMAX combined for about 23 percent of the total, or $17.1 million. CinemaScore audiences gave it an A-minus.

Release strategy and record openings are a recurring subject in Every Movie Plug’s film-history series. A different kind of global rollout is covered in Today in Cinema, November 5: The Matrix Revolutions Ends the Trilogy in 108 Territories at Once.

One Long Take Through Mexico City

The most discussed minutes of Spectre come before the title card. The film opens in Mexico City during the Day of the Dead, following Bond and a companion through a crowded procession, up to a hotel rooftop and into a fight aboard a helicopter above the main square. The sequence is presented as a long take that joins six shots seamlessly. It was one of the few scenes in the film that required previsualization, and the production did not need motion-control cameras to achieve it; the joins were made in post-production through re-timing and re-projection, which even matched Mexican locations with interiors built at Pinewood.

The scale was real. The scene required 1,500 extras, ten giant skeletons and 250,000 paper flowers, and the city’s Zócalo had to be closed while stunt pilot Chuck Aaron flew a Bo 105 helicopter through the fight. Buildings around the square were modified to prevent damage, and some of the most dangerous aerial maneuvers were filmed separately near Palenque in Chiapas and pasted over a computer-generated square and crowd. Some of the work was done by stunt doubles whose faces were replaced digitally with Craig’s.

There is a footnote with a lasting effect on the city itself. At the time of filming, Mexico City did not hold a Day of the Dead parade like the one in the movie. In 2016, partly because of the interest Spectre raised, federal and local authorities organized a real parade through Paseo de la Reforma and the Centro Histórico on October 29, and about 250,000 people attended. Production also drew scrutiny during filming over whether Mexico had asked for script changes in exchange for financial support. Producer Michael G. Wilson denied it and said the production had always intended to shoot the sequence there; the film received a tax rebate of about $14 million from Mexico.

Video: official trailer for Spectre (2015), via YouTube.

The Octopus Returns: Fifty Years of Legal Warfare Over One Villain

The film’s title was not just a marketing choice. Spectre and its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, had been missing from the Eon series for decades because of a dispute that started in 1961, when producer Kevin McClory sued Bond creator Ian Fleming over the novel Thunderball. An out-of-court settlement two years later gave McClory the film rights to the book, including the organization and its characters. McClory worked with Eon to produce Thunderball in 1965 and licensed the elements for ten years, which allowed their appearances in You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever.

McClory died in 2006, and in November 2013 MGM and his estate formally settled with Danjaq, the sister company of Eon, giving MGM the full film rights to the concept of Spectre and its characters. Spectre was therefore the first Eon film to use the organization and Blofeld since 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. A figure resembling Blofeld had appeared in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, but he was never named and his face was never shown because of the same legal tangle. Bringing the group back also meant a quiet retcon: the Quantum organization from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace became a division of Spectre, and Raoul Silva from Skyfall was revealed to have been one of its agents.

The film’s central twist, that Franz Oberhauser is secretly Blofeld and a jealous stepbrother figure from Bond’s childhood, drew on Fleming’s short story “Octopussy,” which mentions a character named Hannes Oberhauser. Mendes searched for events in young Bond’s life to follow the childhood discussed in Skyfall, found Hannes Oberhauser, and built the idea of a child pushed out like a cuckoo in the nest. Antagonists with a personal grievance are the subject of Every Movie Plug’s When Movie Villains Were Right: 10 Antagonists Who Had a Point.

Hacked, Overbudget and Rewritten

The film’s troubles were public before the cameras rolled. In November 2014, hackers released confidential Sony Pictures e-mails, among them memos suggesting that Spectre was over budget, early drafts of John Logan’s screenplay and Sony’s frustration with the project. Eon said the leaked material was an early version of the script. Jez Butterworth was then brought in to polish it, helped by Mendes and Craig, and he said he cut scenes of Bond talking to men because Bond shoots them rather than sitting around chatting.

Money was a recurring tension. Sony had agreed to provide a quarter of the negative cost in return for a quarter of the profits plus distribution fees, and the final budget was estimated at between $245 million and $300 million, which made Spectre the most expensive Bond film and one of the most expensive films ever made. Eon resisted pressure to cut stunts and locations and secured tax incentives instead. The accounting afterward was complicated: Deadline Hollywood calculated a net profit of $98.4 million, while a New York Times report said Sony’s own profit came to about $24.6 million after it paid half the production costs but received only a quarter of certain profits.

Not every director was interested. Nicolas Winding Refn later revealed that he had turned down an offer to direct the movie, a story that sits comfortably alongside the casting and directing what-ifs collected in 10 Actors Who Turned Down Roles That Became Legendary.

Cars, Crashes and the Largest Stunt Explosion on Record

Mendes and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who took over from Roger Deakins, shot the film mostly on Kodak 35 mm stock, supplemented by large-format digital cameras. That was a change from Skyfall, which was shot entirely on digital. Principal photography ran 128 days across Austria, the United Kingdom, Italy, Morocco and Mexico, starting at Pinewood Studios in December 2014 and ending on July 5, 2015.

In Austria, the production filmed around Sölden, the Ötztal Glacier Road, Obertilliach and Lake Altaussee, and the Ice Q restaurant stood in for a private clinic in the Alps. Filming was paused when Craig sprained his knee during a fight scene and again after a filming vehicle accident that injured three crew members. In Rome, a five-week shoot included the Ponte Sisto and the Roman Forum, and the production had to answer concerns from city authorities about damage to historic sites. The car chase along the Tiber paired the Aston Martin DB10, a model created for the film with only ten built, against a Jaguar C-X75 that had been cancelled as a road car and was revived and converted to a conventional engine for filming. According to chief stunt coordinator Gary Powell, seven Aston Martins were destroyed, and the car expenses were estimated at £24 million.

In Morocco, the production used the Gara Medouar crater for Blofeld’s base. An explosion filmed there holds a Guinness World Record for the largest film stunt explosion, using 8,140 liters of kerosene and 24 charges each containing a kilogram of high explosives. Such feats of physical filmmaking are the theme of Every Movie Plug’s 20 Movies That Were Almost Impossible to Film.

The Faces: A Henchman Who Barely Speaks and a Bond Woman at 50

The cast mixed returning players with new arrivals. Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw and Rory Kinnear returned as M, Moneypenny, Q and Bill Tanner, while Jesper Christensen came back as Mr. White, whose fate in the earlier films had been left open. Judi Dench appeared in a posthumous message as the previous M, her eighth appearance in the role since GoldenEye in 1995.

Christoph Waltz was announced as Franz Oberhauser and denied that the part had been written for him, saying the role grew and evolved after he joined. Andrew Scott played Max Denbigh, called C, the head of a new intelligence service that serves Spectre’s plan for a global surveillance network. Léa Seydoux was cast as Dr. Madeleine Swann after Mendes decided he wanted a more experienced actor than the newcomer used in Skyfall, and Monica Bellucci, at 50, became the oldest actress cast as a Bond woman. She had auditioned for Tomorrow Never Dies but lost the part to Teri Hatcher.

Dave Bautista was cast as the assassin Mr. Hinx after producers looked for an actor with a background in contact sports. The character speaks a single word in the whole film. Mendes worried the silence would put Bautista off, but the lifelong Bond fan wanted to revive the wordless henchman of Jaws and Oddjob, and he has said Oddjob in Goldfinger was his main inspiration. Bautista’s later career is in the news again, and Every Movie Plug has covered his latest transformation in Dave Bautista Shows Off 20-Pound Weight Gain on Instagram as God of War Kratos Prep Hits 250.

From Every Movie Plug on X

The Song That Went to Number One, and the Ones That Did Not

The music was almost as busy as the filming. Thomas Newman returned as composer and wrote during production rather than waiting for post-production, and Mendes said the final film would contain more than 100 minutes of music. Radiohead was commissioned to write the title song and submitted “Man of War,” an unreleased song from the 1990s, which was rejected because it had not been written for the film and so would have been ineligible for the Academy Award. The band then recorded another song called “Spectre,” which the producers also passed on as too melancholy.

The producers instead chose Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall,” which Smith wrote with Jimmy Napes in a single session of under half an hour. When it was released in September 2015, it received mixed reviews and drew unfavorable comparisons with Adele’s “Skyfall,” to the extent that Shirley Bassey trended on Twitter. The song nonetheless became the first Bond theme to reach number one on the UK Singles Chart, and it won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Original Song, making it the second Bond theme to win the Oscar. It remains the only Academy Award the film received.

Reviews: Five Stars in London, Colder in Los Angeles

Critical response was split along an almost geographic line. Rotten Tomatoes lists about 63 percent positive reviews from 359 critics, with an average rating of 6.4 out of 10, and Metacritic gives it a weighted average of 60 out of 100, which signals mixed or average reviews. Before the British release, notices were largely positive. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded the film five stars and called it inventive, intelligent and complex, Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph also gave it five, and Mark Kermode gave it four, noting that it fell short of Skyfall but met audience expectations.

American coverage was cooler. Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave it two and a half stars out of four, and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times found it exhausted. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times said there was nothing surprising in it, and Forbes critic Scott Mendelson went furthest, calling it the weakest Bond film in 30 years. Others were warmer: Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave it three and a half stars out of four and called it a valentine to the franchise, and Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times placed it solidly in the middle of the all-time rankings. Entertainment Weekly’s Darren Franich argued the final act was so strange and willfully obtuse that it deserved extra attention. The common complaints were a thin plot and the decision to tie Blofeld to Bond’s childhood, while the action, the cinematography and Newman’s score were praised.

Directors who work inside long-running franchises face a particular kind of scrutiny, a subject touched on in Five Directors, Five Visions: The Signature Styles of Hollywood’s Defining Filmmakers.

The Global Ledger: Records in Britain, Germany and China

Overseas, Spectre performed like an event. It opened to $22.5 million in Germany, including previews, with a record for the biggest Saturday of all time there. In Mexico, where the opening was filmed, it debuted at more than double Skyfall, and in India it opened at number one. France, despite the Paris attacks that closed numerous theaters on November 13, opened to $14.6 million. In the United Kingdom it became the highest-grossing IMAX release ever.

China brought both a record and a letdown. It opened on November 12 with $15 million on its first day and $48.1 million over the weekend, a record for a Hollywood 2D opening, but it fell 75 percent in its second weekend and ended with about $84.7 million, short of the $100 million that had been projected. Overall, the film finished as the sixth-highest-grossing release of 2015 and the second-highest in the series after Skyfall in unadjusted dollars. Lists of the most successful films ever are covered in Every Movie Plug’s The Billion-Dollar Club: The 10 Highest-Grossing Movies of All Time.

The Craig Chapter and the Question of What Comes Next

Spectre was designed to tie Craig’s tenure together. By revealing that a single organization had been behind Le Chiffre, Dominic Greene and Raoul Silva, it recast the first three films as chapters of one story, and it ended with Bond driving away with Swann in a rebuilt Aston Martin DB5 after refusing to kill Blofeld. The follow-up, No Time to Die, closed the Craig era in 2021 with Cary Joji Fukunaga directing.

The 007 franchise is now looking ahead to a new actor. Every Movie Plug’s report on the casting search, Who Will Be the Next James Bond? Casting Reportedly Narrows to a Short List, covers the names that have been reported, and the Craig films, Spectre included, remain the benchmark any successor will be measured against.

How to Revisit Spectre

The film was released on Digital HD on January 22, 2016, and on DVD and Blu-ray in February that year, where it topped the home video charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom. It arrived on Ultra HD Blu-ray in October 2019 as part of a Craig collection and as a standalone release in 2020. Streaming availability changes often, so check current listings before you plan a viewing.

A natural order is Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and then Spectre, which makes the film’s attempt to link the earlier chapters easier to judge. Viewers who prefer to watch for craft can concentrate on the opening take, the Rome chase and the Morocco finale, which show what the film’s large budget bought.

Frequently Asked Questions About Spectre

Conclusion: Eleven Years On, a Bond Film Still Worth Arguing About

Spectre is a film that reaches for a large, interlocking story and does not always hold it together, yet it delivers some of the most carefully engineered set pieces in the series, from a six-shot opening in Mexico City to a record-setting explosion in the Sahara. It ended a legal battle that had lasted more than half a century, returned the most famous villain in the series to the screen and gave Craig a chapter of his own.

Today in Cinema returns with another film from movie history. Recent entries include The Matrix Revolutions, Godzilla and American Gangster.