Producing one opening ceremony for a global sporting event like the FIFA World Cup Ceremony is an intense undertaking. So imagine what it’s like to produce three in two days.
That was the undertaking for Balich Wonder Studio, the Banijay Live company responsible for bringing to life three spectacle openers for the 2026 World Cup across Mexico, Canada and the United States of America. The events, which opened games in the respective host cities Thursday and Friday for an estimated 1.2 billion viewers worldwide — roughly 10 times the audience of the latest Super Bowl — brought together the work of more than 1,000 craftspeople, performers and volunteers to launch the biggest soccer tournament on record.
“I’m very proud to say that for the first time in the same year, the same live agency has created the opening of the Olympics and for FIFA,” Balich Wonder Studio founder and chairman Marco Balich told TheWrap of the company’s eventful 2026. “I am super proud of our team, they did a magnificent job.”
Along with Shakira, who returned to the World Cup stage with new single “Dai Dai” featuring Burna Boy, the opening ceremonies featured some of music’s biggest names like Andrea Bocelli, Danny Ocean, Alejandro Fernandez and Belinda in Mexico; Jessie Reyez, Alessia Cara, Michael Bublé and Elyanna in Canada; and Future, Anitta, Lisa, Rema and Katy Perry in USA, among others.
The massive production paid off in spades, setting the stage for World Cup opening games to break viewership records for the sporting event — the Mexico-South Africa match secured more than 20 million viewers in the U.S. across platforms in both English and Spanish.
Below, Balich tells TheWrap about the task of producing three back-to-back opening ceremonies, honoring the host country’s cultures and dispels those rumors about Shakira’s performance. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: Congratulations on an incredible achievement with these opening ceremonies. How does it feel to see global audiences respond to three ceremonies across three countries in just two days?
Balich: Never has a live event company ever sustained such a complex operation, managing three ceremonies in three different nations and representing three different cultures. We had a very strong collaboration with FIFA, who really supported having three comprehensive ceremonies, which featured the same narrative arc — celebrating the local culture, celebrating the energy and the music and celebrating the trophy — but narrated from three different points of view, with three different color tones, three different kinds of music, three different language presentations.
We had a very Cumbia, Latin energetic vibe at the beginning; we had the very glitzy, shining superstar themes in Los Angeles; and we had this very natural, earthy approach in Canada. We had three different teams [on the ground] — one Canadian, one Mexican and one American — but overall we, as the experts in big ceremonies, were overseeing and supporting FIFA’s vision to make three ceremonies.
So we are very, very, very happy because it feels like a great achievement … Above all, our work is to generate a sense of pride and belonging. It’s so refreshing to sit down on a couch and just watch a game between Tunisia, to name a country, knowing that in that nation, everyone is up at 3 a.m. watching together. This is something that the American sports fan should enjoy even if they don’t understand the language of soccer, they should just lay back and understand the joy of having the entire planet being tuned in to this very simple game that draws so much identity and personification and sense of pride, and beautiful stories as well.
Just talking about organizing three of these events feels overwhelming, given that just one live ceremony takes hundreds of people and months to prepare. How does it work when you have to produce three events in different countries?
It is in a way [presenting] three halftime shows in 14 hours. Plus a protocol moment, which halftime shows don’t usually have. We had about 300 people each ceremony as a cast, and then we had about 700 staff between lights and just moving stages and all that, setting up the sets, the pyro, the music, etc.
With this kind of show, you hope everything will go right on the day. But with social media, every mistake is amplified to a scale that you know you have to be so careful about everything that happens, even to the smallest detail, because there will be somebody with a phone filming and it goes viral just like that. For example, we had an issue with the trophy in Toronto. Normally these things happen in live entertainment. There was a technical problem, really a composition of issues we could not forecast. If it was only the broadcast, that would have come and gone, but with social media, it was obviously noted immediately. But we have nothing to hide. In Mexico City, we had all these great folkloric dancers celebrating pre-Hispanic culture with all those elaborate, feather outfits, and some of them were very difficult for them to walk in. Imagine if you see someone tripping. It becomes the story of the day. But this is the beauty of live television, and it’s inevitable to have mistakes. We don’t like it but it happens.
Overall, it was great to coordinate this large group of people. I am super proud of our team, they did a magnificent job.
The ceremonies shared some of the same DNA, highlighting performances from big acts as well as the culture of the host countries. How do you balance the star power with honoring Mexico, Canada and the USA respectively?
That’s a good note. The halftime show for the Super Bowl usually has one leading artist with guest stars. Here, we had a sequence of really relevant artists for the region and they were performing in sequence, going up and down the stage — and anchoring the protocol moments with the flags and the national anthems.
Pulling that off was a great achievement, and I have to thank [Mexico and Canada ceremonies] creative director Carlos Navarrete Patino, who has grown to be one of the best line directors in the world. And for the U.S., Jenny Koons from Vita Motus [and her team], they all come from the theater so we support them with our experience. I’m grateful to all of them.
Shakira has been a perennial presence in World Cup ceremonies for decades. How was it working with her on her first performance of “Dai Dai”?
She’s super professional and a star, and had a terrific group of dancers around her. I really bow to her, because she knows exactly what she wants. She knows the camera angle she wants, and she’s very, very decent. And she will be back also for the final halftime show with Madonna and BTS; that will be interesting to see.
What’s your reaction to fans joking about a Shakira impersonator being the one to perform instead of her? Those sunglasses sparked so many memes.
That all has to do with this new openness that you get with social media, which allows people to say whatever they want. That can be good or bad, in a way, because sometimes there’s a lot of unnecessary hype on something that is not relevant.
When people start to debate if she was the real one performing or not, I just abandon that kind of conversation because I’d rather focus on the fact that the performance is impactful, and the music that she promotes is really engaging. It’s fun and it’s energetic.
Each of the ceremonies were broken up between the bigger set-piece performances, followed by the flag ceremonies, a spotlight performance and the national anthems, spreading out the spectacle for more than an hour in some cases. Why not combine all the set pieces?
The liturgy of soccer, which requires the warmup of the players 25 minutes before the match. So in order to create something that is more relevant, we had to add something before the warm-up, because there is no way you can break these given slots. So FIFA started this in Qatar in 2022 — where we were also in charge of the ceremony — to stage something before the warm-up.
And we were very scared that we wouldn’t have the audience there, but Mexico especially was packed. They really went there to enjoy the full scale of the show and see that their favorite players were involved.
In Los Angeles, we had to deal with this sort of habit of joining very late. But still, there was a big reaction. And I thought it was really interesting to see how the audience was surprised to see these very fast-paced, high-skill music sequences. Plus, SoFi Stadium is such a fantastic stadium to perform in. We do productions in every stadium around the world, and this is probably the best stadium I’ve worked with. It’s really a celebration of the theatricality of sports in this massive way. I look forward to seeing what my producer colleagues will do with it for the Olympics.
Balich Wonder Studio is producing the World Cup’s upcoming 4th of July celebration, part of a match hosted in Philadelphia. What can you tease about that?
It’s a very historical moment. I feel honored and flattered to be put in the position to do something that will try to celebrate these 250 beautiful years of the growth of this nation that started as a collection of colonies and turned out to be, in many many instances the leading nation of the world, whether it’s in financials, science or media, you name it. It’s been such an example for the rest of the world, so it’s very important that we reconnect to that. It’s a big honor.
So what is happening is that we’re going to celebrate the original act of independence in a very musical way, so I’ll let you think about it for now. I cannot reveal anything, otherwise FIFA will be upset with me, but the idea is that the act of independence was the first milestone of a beautiful journey that needs to be celebrated in the best way possible — not in a divisive way, it needs to be celebrated in a unified way, so I hope everybody feels proud of being a part of this celebration in that moment.
