What it could mean for Spain

In early May last year, almost 150 good and great people from the Spanish film and TV industry led by Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Alejandro Amenábar signed a joint open letter expressing their gratitude to Domingo Corral, who has just been fired by the giant Spanish telco Telefónica as director of fiction and entertainment of Movistar Plus+, the largest Spanish pay-TV/SVOD service.

They also expressed concerns about the future of Movistar Plus+, which under Corral’s pioneering creative leadership went on to produce series and films that put Spain on an international stage, winning as recently as 2025 the top prize at Series Mania – Alauda Ruíz de Azúa’s “Querer” – and a top prize at Cannes – Oliver Laxe’s jury prize winner “Sirāt,” which went on to earn two Oscar nominations. Movistar Plus+ once again won the highest rating in San Sebastián in September – with “Sundays”, again from Ruíz de Azúa.

Now, almost eleven months later, Corral is once again making waves. On Tuesday, in the biggest news at this year’s Series Mania, HBO Max’s head of original content, Sarah Aubrey, announced a first-look deal with Corral for “exclusive television services in Spain.”

Her first project, she said during her Series Mania masterclass, is a series about El Nani, a young petty criminal who disappeared into police custody in 1983. The trial involving the Franco police perpetrators became a show trial for Spain’s young democracy. The Nani series is written and directed by Alberto Rodríguez together with Rafael Cobos, who, again a success, participates this week in the Series Mania main competition with “The Anatomy of a Moment”, again from Movistar Plus+ under Corral.

Under Aubrey, HBO Max is accused of being HBO. In partnership with HBO Max, there are every signs that Domingo Corral may remain Domingo Corral.

“What are you looking for?” Aubrey was asked during her masterclass. “The answer is always the best stories from the best creators,” she replied.

Corral’s resume certainly fits that bill, having produced Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s ‘Riot Police’ and ‘The New Years’ – the later selected for Venice alongside series by Alfonso Cuarón, Joe Wright and Thomas Vinterberg – as well as ‘La Mesías’ by Javier Ambrosi and Javier Calvo, a series that won again at Series Mania and dazzled French critics, and was praised by the newspaper Liberation in 2024 as ‘one of the most beautiful series of the series. the year.”

Given series that travel internationally, like “The Last of Us,” Aubrey said at Series Mania, “there isn’t the same pressure on a local show to somehow transform itself into a global protagonist, which is honestly a recipe for disaster.” I strongly believe in creating a show for its audience and making it specific. And if so, then success will resonate wherever you look at it.”

During the almost ten years that Corral made series at Movistar Plus, they discovered Spain, its environment, styles, concerns, history and talents. At the same time, they celebrate the voices of authors and were created at a budgetary level that proved competitive with production levels in France and Italy.

The artistic ambitions of series created by Corral can be astonishing. For example, each episode of ‘The Anatomy of a Moment’, co-produced with Arte France, is tinged by a different genre or genres. Episode 1, for example, comes across as a political thriller with horror tropes in which Prime Minister Adolfo Saúrez struggles in 1976 to convince – or bribe – a Franco-parliament to make itself disappear.

That’s not to say that ‘Anatomy’ is a niche art market. At the end of last year, it gave Movistar Plus+ the biggest bow of all Movistar Plus+ Originals in history.

As Spanish broadcasters and pay-TV operators cut budgets, turn increasingly to non-fiction or withdraw from scripted production altogether – public broadcaster RTVE – it may well be that only a global streaming service has the resources to make the series the way Corral wants to make them. This involves deep development. But, as noted in the Series Mania masterclass, one of the first things Aubrey did in her role was increase development budgets.

However, the HBO Max-Corral deal raises two big questions.

So far, the Nani series is well within Rodríguez and Cobos’ comfort zone. They have spent much of their career as directors and writers exploring the concept of transition in Spanish history in a very nuanced way: how agents with a Franco past worked side by side with progressive colleagues long after Spain became a democracy in 1977 (“Swampland”); how Spain could have taken a turn toward modernity, but didn’t (“The Plague”) or did so, even though democracy was hanging on by a thread (“The Anatomy of a Moment”).

Moreover, Cobos has just released his first feature as a director, the extraordinarily stylish “Golpes,” set in 1982 and littered with historical documentary footage from the period, featuring in the antihero Migueli another quinqui as El Nani: marginalized working-class criminals who committed robberies in the early ’80s, driven by a vague sense of desire for freedom and deep-seated contempt for middle-class authority and convention.

However, the Nani project is more than just one project. It’s the high-profile collaboration of two creatives that gave Movistar Plus+ its first major signature series in the 1580 Seville film series ‘The Plague’, as well as one of the early Spanish film hits in ‘Prison 1977’, a standout episode in the innovative lock-down collective series ‘Offworld’ and Movistar Plus+’s second major prize at a French TV festival, in Canneseries’ best short format accolades for the Cobos-directed ‘The Left Handed’. Son’, a moving portrait of a mother and son in Seville, rooted in their sense of failure and search for human warmth and respect.

A first question, after this landmark collaboration between Rodríguez, Cobos and Corral, is how many others in the young Spanish cadre of film and TV makers – Sorogoyen, Ruiz de Azúa, de Javis and Laxe, to name just a few – will eventually collaborate with Corral.

“It just made sense to us that someone with all these deep talent relationships and this great track record and taste would work with us as we look for new projects,” Aubrey said during her masterclass.

However, how many projects Corral can manage may depend on a second question: How long will HBO Max, owned by Paramount through its purchase of WBD, remain HBO? The easy answer to that is: no one knows. The answer, however, will determine part of the international future of a truly groundbreaking, auteur-empowering TV production for which both HBO and Corral have become known.