Thanks to last year’s Sony hacking scandal, one of Hollywood’s top producing studios is still struggling to recover from the fallout. Now it looks like Spectre, the next James Bond film is on the list of affected productions. According to the International Business Times, the leak included a report detailing millions of dollars the new film would receive from the Mexican government. In return, America’s southern neighbor wanted significant script changes that would portray the country in a “positive light.”
According to the report, the government gave Spectre $14 million dollars in exchange for four minutes of positive spin, along with the ability to make casting decisions and additional script changes. One such casting decision involved the ethnicity of the actress playing Estrella, a woman whose hotel room Bond uses to begin his hunt for an assassin named Sciarra. Mexico requested a “well-known Mexican actress” for the minor role. In addition, Sciarra would not be Mexican.
Mexico’s other requests include:
- Replace the character of a Mexican governor — Sciarra’s target — with an international leader.
- Replace the Mexican police with “some special police force.”
- Replace a cage fight scene with footage of the country’s “Day of the Dead” festival.
An additional $6 million was thrown into the deal for shots of Mexico’s modernized skylines. None of this is too surprising for a film franchise famous for product placement, but even this seems a bit much.
