Made in Spain: How the Country Became Key to Netflix’s International Strategy

Plenty of TV- and movie-industry insiders were stunned by the seemingly overnight success of Squid Game back in late 2021. After decades of Hollywood hegemony over the entertainment industry, the idea that a series from a non-English-speaking country could become the most popular series ever on Netflix within a matter of weeks was almost incomprehensible. For veteran writer-producer �lex Pina, however, such a concept was already old news.

Four years before the world became obsessed with Hwang Dong-hyuk’s dystopian drama, Pina experienced the hitmaking power of Netflix’s global platform firsthand when La Casa de Papel, a heist thriller he created for Spanish linear TV network Antena 3, was added to the streamer. As has become its practice for most acquisitions, Netflix did zero marketing for Casa. And yet despite this, the series quickly became a huge hit on the streamer — first on Netflix Spain and then later in 2017, when the company recut the show into shorter episodes, gave it a new name for English-language audiences (Money Heist), and began rolling it out to subscribers around the world. By spring 2018, Netflix was already touting Pina’s creation as its most popular non-English-language series ever, and by the summer of 2019, with the arrival of season two, fans like Stephen King were proudly showing off swag from the series. Two years after Money Heist ended its 41-episode, five-season run, the series still accounts for three of the ten most-viewed non-English TV seasons ever on Netflix, and two of the most-viewed in any language.

Of course, at this point, Netflix’s international strategy is hardly a mystery: Give creators in local regions ample resources to make high-quality shows designed for viewers in those specific countries. Many, if not most, won’t become massive international hits and will only serve as programming that attracts and keeps subscribers in local markets. But because the Netflix platform also offers global reach, a decent portion of those localized productions will become breakout hits around the world and potentially morph into bigger franchises. It’s a game plan Netflix execs have been talking about since at least 2018, and so far, it’s been working pretty darn well.

That’s certainly the case with Money Heist. While the original series has been over for a few years, Netflix is still mining the franchise for more viewers. The streamer released a two-part South Korean adaptation of the show in 2022, and the Pina-created prequel series Berlin — which is based on a character from the original show and is set in Paris — debuted at the end of 2023. Like its predecessor, Berlin became a near-instant hit: As of Monday, the new show stands as the ninth-most-viewed non-English series ever, generating nearly 52 million global views during its first 38 days of release, according to Netflix’s self-reported public audience metrics. Pina has also been working on other non–Money Heist projects for the streamer as part of an overall deal he’s had with the company since 2018, including the three-season action thriller Sky Rojo.

And much the way Squid Game’s success was followed by Netflix investing in more Korean content, the streamer has been steadily pouring more resources into Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries (including Mexico) over the past six years. Elite, which was already in the works at Netflix Spain before Money Heist, has been a smash success for seven seasons, with an eighth installment of the soap in the works. Mexico’s Who Killed Sara? is firmly entrenched in Netflix’s all-time non-English top-ten list. And just weeks after its debut, Netflix Spanish feature film Society of the Snow, which has multiple nominations at next month’s Academy Awards, has become one of the five most-viewed non-English Netflix films ever, per the streamer’s self-reported audience metrics.

With Berlin still doing blockbuster business on the Netflix charts, Buffering recently caught up with Pina to talk about his six-year association with the streamer. Talking by phone through a translator, the 56-year-old writer-producer discussed how the international TV industry was transformed almost overnight by streaming, why he’s not interested in doing an American version of Money Heist, and how Netflix’s investment in building production facilities in Spain has been paying off for creators like him. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Take me back to when Money Heist first started breaking out on Netflix in 2018. The show has already been on linear TV in Spain and was doing pretty well. But then it exploded when it hit streaming. What did that success tell you about how Netflix could be a different kind of platform than traditional television?

I think it said that Netflix had democratized fiction. Now you had a product that could reach a way larger audience like a Hollywood film — 191 countries could watch Money Heist. It let viewers see something exotic that was different from what they were used to seeing in accordance to the American parameters. Only Netflix could do that at that time. Also, Netflix included us in its catalogue without any promotion behind it, which is something that happens many times with shows. So it was completely unexpected what happened, completely inexplicable. It was a word-of-mouth phenomenon.

At the time you signed your first overall deal with Netflix, you were quoted saying that the success of your show should be seen as a sign that writers and producers from around the world were poised to begin “pushing back on the U.S.� dominance of scripted TV. I’m curious how you, as a showrunner, felt about the old status quo pre-Netflix. In other words, were you at all frustrated that while big hits from America easily traveled around the world, a big successful show from Spain or another country in Europe or Asia rarely was able to break out internationally? 

There’s a lot of creativity outside of Hollywood. We’ve always done fiction for prime time. We have the craft and the creativity; we did different hybrids and genres. We have many, many ideas, so we knew we had it. But now, suddenly, you see how our product has ended up working in such different places, like in Finland and Eastern Europe. The difference now is — it’s all about the distribution channels. They were all dedicated to Hollywood products. And it wasn’t just that it was difficult for them to believe in a product from here; it was that you couldn’t even begin to conceive of the idea of this happening. I couldn’t remotely imagine we could be where we are.

After your success with Money Heist, Netflix has had a slew of other global hits such as Elite and, of course, Squid Game. American-made shows are still more likely to become huge, but I’m wondering how much you think the playing field has been leveled? Is the marketplace for international productions so vibrant that there’s very little difference between a U.S. show and one from, say, Spain, in terms of its ability to reach a big audience?

I think the biggest change is to the American industry, actually. They have new competitors in fiction now from the international arena, and what they are seeing is that, even with a lower budget, international shows are taking a large chunk of their audience. So they do have a problem with the democratization of ideas. They need to somewhat increase their own creativity to search for new ideas. And that’s part of the natural process: The only one who will survive is the one who is able to better entertain the public, to better engage with the audiences and to be able to generate new stories. The American industry, they were very well off, and now they have to react to what’s happening because they didn’t have competition before.

And you credit Netflix with this.

What Netflix did is they included creatives from all over the world in the “gang.� I also think there’s a general lack of self-criticism among showrunners. I think the problem for the American creators is that they have to prove why they were where they were. The streaming services bring the same opportunity for the rest of us. I think we are better off now because we have the ability to be No. 1 in the world. I think Berlin already has reached No. 1 in the world. So what this does actually is it makes everyone try to be better. Only the best ones will survive, and I think we will eventually get better shows.

Let’s talk about your latest show, Berlin. It’s set in the Money Heist universe, but unlike the original, it was created with the knowledge that there was the potential for a big global audience. Was there any temptation to tinker with what worked with your first show to appeal to a possibly even wider audience? Or did you just make the show you wanted to make with the hope that once again the audience would find it? 

I think in 2018, no one could be aware of the potential for Spanish-language shows in the Latin culture, though of course, there are almost as many Spanish speakers as English speakers. And you saw how La Casa de Papel penetrated the Latin audience and then took off around the world. But with Berlin, we didn’t think about the global audience. We always look for our identity; that comes first and foremost. So with the new show, we tried to separate ourselves from La Casa De Papel. We wanted to do something different, that was pure entertainment. We beefed up all the comedic elements and all the romantic sides because we wanted to see more of that, and I think the audience did, too.

You just mentioned injecting the show with Latin identity, which is something you also said in another interview five years ago. You said then that you and your shows are “fundamentally Latino. Our epicenter is always emotionally exaggerated.� Can you elaborate as to what you meant by that, and how it plays out in the kinds of shows that you make and the characters you create?  

Well, we always try to give a little twist to our characters. They have to have something special for the audience. They have to be exceptional, they have to be better than oneself. And with Money Heist, if you take a close look at it, they’re hugging each other a lot. You have this elevated friendship. And I think that you have, of course, the strategy of the heist, but also very important and present there is how elevated the emotions and the affections are in the show. And it’s way more exaggerated than any kind of Anglo-Saxon show you can see.

I think people like to see this. The films or the shows from the “perfect heist� genre in the U.S. are often cold, and very calculated. We do have that brainy side in the strategy, but I think the people depicted in the show are way more affectionate and I think it’s something that helps enrich the narrative. I think to the U.S. audience, it’s like a young boy who loves the stories he listens to from his granny, but suddenly his uncle comes home one day and he tells him a different kind of story and he gets his full attention because it’s completely different.

Your budgets have gone up, obviously, since season one of Money Heist, and Netflix has also expanded its production footprint in Spain by launching a whole new facility there called Tres Cantos. Have either of these things changed how you approach making shows?

Well, we focus a lot on the narrative side of our productions, and your dream depends a lot on your budget. So when you don’t have money to burn a gas station, you have to figure out something else. We came to Netflix with a low-budget show and it worked. So the budget gives you the ability of doing more or less, of having a larger board or a smaller one. What a bigger budget gave us, in the last seasons of Money Heist, was being able to put our characters on an oil platform, or to make a meteor shower. And as for the Tres Cantos facilities, what I can tell you is that what it has enabled us, for example in Berlin, to shoot in a virtual stage. You can do impossible action scenes on a virtual stage.

Netflix has made a Korean adaptation of La Casa de Papel. Do you have any interest in doing that in other countries outside of Europe? Maybe an American remake that you oversaw? Or is there even a need these days since your original has already been seen by so many people here?

Adaptations or remakes made more sense before than they do now. I think we have found a more or less common language, and by this, I mean that people are getting used to watching international productions. We are more capable of broadening our horizons, and we like seeing actors from different countries and not just the actors from our own country. When I started writing fiction, I remember my executive producer telling me, “Well, you have to hire the same people because the audience wants to see the same actors all the time.� And I think this has changed and it’s quite the opposite now. People like to see new faces, so I’ve cast people that are quite unknown in my shows. The audience is more and more international every day.

So if I am able to succeed with Spanish actors in Money Heist, why would anyone want to see the same, but with, for example, English actors? In Asia, we have this remake of Money Heist and I think there are many more people that have watched the original Money Heist than the remake they’ve done from Korea. So I think it makes less sense to do local adaptations. What we like to do is to keep combining different genres. In Berlin, you’ll be able to find four different genres. It’s like a Russian nesting doll, where you keep on opening one and the other and you keep on finding different layers.

Would you ever want to produce any kind show in the U.S. with American actors, maybe a totally original idea?

I am already doing scripted content for the whole world. Before, if I wanted to do that, you had to travel to the U.S. But now, it’s something we can do from here. So I would like to continue writing fiction from where I am because I cannot help but be an advocate of Spain. I think you can have a very nice life in Spain. I love it, and I invite you to come here and see. If you did this, you would understand me. The beauty of 2024 is that you don’t have to migrate to reach the whole world.