News

Prime Video has wrapped its most ambitious action thriller in Latin America. Produced by Pablo Cruz of transatlantic production company El Estudio, “A Billion to One” stars two of Mexico’s biggest stars, Omar Chaparro (“No Manches Frida”) and Alejandro Speitzer (“Someone Has to Die”).

At the core of the pic are Carlos (Chaparro) and Miguel (Speitzer), best friends and elite soldiers in the Mexican special forces. Their lives take a turn when Carlos witnesses the brutal murder of his wife. Consumed by grief and a thirst for justice, Carlos, with Miguel by his side, embarks on a perilous quest for revenge, armed with a life-changing lottery ticket and unwavering grit.

“This project represents a significant milestone for our local productions, and we are excited to continue our great relationship with El Estudio, as well as to have such talented actors as our cast to bring this story to audiences worldwide,...

Ester Expósito was born on January 26, 2000, in Madrid, Spain. From a young age, she displayed a keen interest in the artistic world and knew that acting was her true calling. At the age of 16, after completing her studies, Expósito decided to pursue her dream and enrolled in acting courses.

Expósito’s talent and dedication quickly caught the attention of industry insiders. In 2013 and 2015, she received recognition for her acting skills, winning the Best Actress award at the Madrid Theater Awards. These early accolades set the stage for what was to come in her career.

One of Expósito’s most significant breakthroughs came with her role in the Netflix teen drama series, Élite. She portrayed the character of Carla Rosón Caleruega, a complex and intriguing character that captured the attention of audiences worldwide. Expósito’s portrayal of Carla showcased her ability to bring depth and authenticity to her performances, solidifying her...

Manolo Caro has entered a multi-year first look deal with Onyx Collective alongside Rafael Ley and Maria Jose Cordova of Woo Films, who produced Caro’s Netflix series “The House of Flowers.”

Along with “The House of Flowers,” which ran for three seasons from 2018 to 2020, Caro is known for creating Netflix’s 2020 limited series “Someone Has to Die” and directing films including 2016’s “Tales of an Immoral Couple” and 2018’s “Perfect Strangers.” Woo Films has been behind several of Caro’s projects as well as films the Netflix films “Noise” (2022) and “Where the Tracks End” (2023) and the Viggo Mortensen-led “Eureka” (2023).

“Manolo Caro is in a rare class of storytellers who blend heart and humor to reveal the essence of what makes us all human,” said Tara Duncan, president of Onyx Collective. “He is a proven hit maker, and we’re excited to bring his universal stories to the Hulu audience.

While Jessica Chastain and director Michel Franco walked carpets and conducted press conferences at the Venice Film Festival, where they were feted for their film Memory, the duo were also holding a little secret close to their vests.

Prior to Memory hitting Venice, Chastain and Franco completed shooting a feature this summer in San Francisco.

Dreams stars Chastain along with Mexican ballet dancer and actor Isaac Hernandez and Rupert Friend, the British actor who has become a Wes Anderson featured player of late.

Details are scarce but the story involves a possible forbidden romance between a woman, who works for an arts foundation, and a ballet dancer. Franco wrote the script and is directing.

The movie shot in San Francisco with a budget of around $3 million, according to sources. It did have a SAG-AFTRA waiver allowing it to shoot during the actors strike.

Franco is producing the movie,...

Annecy — In major news for Mexican animation as it comes under the spotlight at Annecy, director Sofia Carrillo is teaming with “Roma” producer Nicolas Celis and ‘Dance of the 41’ writer Monika Revilla to make “Insectario,” which bids fair to become one of the first stop motion features from Mexico.

Targeting family audiences, and written by Revilla, “Insectario” is set up at Celis’ Pimienta Films.

Carrillo, who worked on the Mexican second unit on “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” based out of Guadalajara’s El Taller del Chucho, told Variety that “Insectario” will build on the same aesthetic universe of “Cerulia” using the same puppets and sometimes the same sets.

“To a certain extent, ‘Insectario’ is a prolongation of the world of ‘Cerulia,’ but with an independent story which stands by itself,” she said.

In “Cerulia,” Carrillo’s crowning triumph which made her one of the most sought-after directors in Mexico,...

Ester Expósito, one of the stars of Netflix global hit “Elite,” is attached to star “The Wailing” (“El Llanto”), co-written by Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s regular co-scribe Isabel Peña (“The Beasts”) and directed by talent-to-track Pedro Martín-Calero (“Secrets”). It’s one of the most powerful Spanish-language packages being brought onto Berlin’s European Film Market.

The auteur genre movie has gone into production, shooting in Madrid, Buenos Aires and La Plata.

Film Factory Entertainment has acquired international rights. “The Wailing” is lead produced by on-the-rise Madrid production house Caballo Films, behind Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s films, including “The Beasts,” a best picture Goya on Feb. 11.

The feature debut of Spain’s Pedro Martín-Calero, “The Wailing” turns on a seemingly invisible evil. “No one can see it with the naked eye, but its presence has always been there. 20 years ago he stalked Camila and Marie. Now, 10,000 kilometers away, Andrea has begun to hear the wailing,...

The Fear Collection, a new horror-based joint venture between Sony Pictures International, Amazon Prime Video and Alex de la Iglesia’s Pokeepsie Films, has announced its next feature production, “Venus” from Spanish genre legend Jaume Balagueró (“[Rec]” “Mientras duermes”) and starring one of the country’s most exciting young actors, Ester Expósito.

Balagueró’s new feature was announced at the genre-specialist Sitges Film Festival, where De la Iglesia was premiering his latest “Veneciafrenia,” the first production undertaken by The Fear Collection. Plot details are scant to nonexistent, but Balagueró will be joined by screenwriter Fernando Navarro (“Veronica”) and production will begin in November to facilitate a 2022 theatrical launch.

“When Álex called me to direct ‘Venus’ I immediately said yes,” said Balagueró in the announcement. “I thought about what would happen if we took the universe of cosmic terror created by Lovecraft and transferred it to today, in a miserable, dirty environment...

In its continued bid to bolster and secure proven talent in Latin America, Netflix has announced a three-year exclusive creative partnership for series and a first look film pact with Chilean writer José Ignacio “Chascas” Valenzuela, creator, showrunner and executive producer of the hit Netflix series “Who Killed Sara?”

Valenzuela is now tooling the third season of “Who Killed Sara?,” co-written with his long-time collaborators Rosario Valenzuela and Jean Pierre Fica, which kicks off production in Mexico on Oct. 18.

According to Netflix, the first season of the series was viewed by more than 55 million households in its first four weeks, landing in the Top 10 of 87 countries, including the U.S., Germany, Israel, Brazil and France. The second season followed shortly, a couple of months after the first.

“I’d like to understand the phenomenon of its success myself and that way, minimize errors in my next shows,” Valenzuela mused. He...

Initiating one of Amazon’s most ambitious titles ever in Latin America, production has begun on “La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta,” the region’s first Western Amazon Original series, Amazon Prime Video announced Tuesday.

An “action-packed” series made in Mexico, it added, “La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta” stars top Mexican actor Juan Manuel Bernal and Alejandro Speitzer, a fast-rising star after prominent roles in Mexican hits in “Dark Desire” and “Someone Has to Die.”

Backed by a powerful creative combo, the Amazon Original series is produced by Dynamo, who handled the physical production of “Narcos” in Colombia and produced Amazon’s “Falco” and Netflix’s first-anounced Colombian Original series, “Green Frontier.”

The series is created by Dynamo’s Diego Ramírez Schrempp and Fidelio’s Mauricio Leiva-Cock.

Series episodes will be directed by Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz and David Pablos, fresh of his success with “Dance of the 41,” and director of “The Chosen Ones,...

Madrid-based Avalon is transforming from a prestige producer-distributor into an industrial force.

Founded by CEO Stefan Schmitz in 1996, Avalon has carved a reputation most recently for co-producing and releasing in Spain Carla Simon’s “Summer 1993,” a Berlin 2017 First Feature Award winner. It co-produced Clara Roquet’s Cannes Critics’ Week entry “Libertad.”

The shingle, set to distribute “Benedetta” and “Bergman Island” in Spain, now has an 11-title production slate, both features and drama series, taking in new titles from leading lights in a new generation of female Catalan cineastes.

Simón herself has rural family drama “Alcarrás” in shooting and is developing her third feature, “Romería,” “a kind of continuation of ‘Summer 93,’” Schmitz said. “Alcarrás“ – “a highly cinematographic, and bigger budgeted Spanish independent film,” said Schmitz – is being sold by MK2.

“Libertad” director Clara Roquet is co-writing “Creatura,” set up at San Sebastian project lab Ikusmira Berriak, from Malaga best director...

Cecilia Suárez (The House of Flowers) and Augusto Aguilera (Too Old To Die Young) are set as leads opposite John Ortiz in ABC’s drama pilot Promised Land.

Written by Matt Lopez, Promised Land is an epic, generation-spanning drama about two Latinx families vying for wealth and power in California’s Sonoma Valley.

Suárez plays Lettie Sandoval, the matriarch of the Sandoval family, a wealthy vineyard-owning family in the Sonoma Valley. Lettie will do anything to keep her family, with all its fraying allegiances, intact. She is proud of the fortune the Sandovals have built, but the arrival of a figure from Lettie’s past soon causes her to question whether the cost of achieving the American Dream is too high.

Aguilera will play Mateo Sandoval,the hardworking, highly capable general manager of the Heritage Vineyard, but as the stepson to patriarch Joe Sandoval (Ortiz), he has never felt fully accepted by the wealthy,...

James Schamus (pictured, left), the former co-president of Focus Features who is best known for his laureled producing partnership with multi Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, is creating his first TV series for Netflix Mexico.

Schamus will serve as executive producer and showrunner for the series, which he co-wrote with Monika Revilla and author Fernanda Melchor (“Hurricane Season”).

The series, whose storyline is under wraps, will shoot in Spanish with local crew and talent in Mexico and is set to debut later this year. Francisco Ramos, VP of Spanish-language originals for Netflix in Latin America, told Variety that Schamus is learning Spanish. Ramos also expressed his delight at the “complete and diverse slate” that Netflix Mexico has put together in recent years.

This is the first major Latino collaboration for Schamus — producer of Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” as well as “The Ice Storm,” which he also co-wrote — since his 1990 producing debut,...

Mexico’s Manolo Caro, the creator, director and writer of “The House of Flowers,” may have another Netflix Original hit on his hands with the dark family thriller “Someone Has to Die” (Alguien Tiene Que Morir).

Director of five movies and a documentary since 2013’s feature debut “I Don’t Know Whether to Slit My Wrists or Leave Them Long,” Caro became only the second showrunner from Spain and Latin America, following “Money Heist’s” Alex Pina, to sign a multi-year production pact with Netflix, in May 2019.

Available globally from Oct. 16, “Someone Has to Die” once again moves the industry dial for Netflix on its Spanish-language production scene. Caro and Diego Ávalos, Netflix vice president of original content for Spain, discussed the process at an online Spanish-language conversation hosted by Madrid’s Casa America, which was released on Friday.

The need to be even “more specific in content, while portraying human relations,...

Netflix added a ton of great stuff this past week and in case you missed all the new additions to the streaming service’s library over the last seven days, here’s a round-up of everything that went up on the site over this period.

As you can see below, this haul contained a number of original titles, including a few highlights of the Halloween season. On Wednesday the 15th, for instance, family horror A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting dropped. The following day then brought Spanish thriller Someone Has to Die and French series La Révolution, which puts a twist on the origins of the French Revolution. As for newly licensed titles, Thursday also delivered social media horror Unfriended while stop-motion animated film ParaNorman arrived on Friday.

Here’s the full list of Netflix additions from Monday, October 12th to Sunday, October 18th:

Released October 12

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts...

Get ready, streamers. This is a huge weekend when it comes to new releases, as the various major streaming service have lots of fresh content to offer over the next few days. There are a ton of must-see originals dropping from today, Friday the 16th, right up until Sunday, with Netflix unveiling one of its biggest titles of the month, Disney Plus releasing a brand new movie and Hulu adding a new Marvel series.

To start with, Netflix’s Friday haul is stuffed with original films and TV shows, including La Révolution, a French historical program that puts a twist on the French Revolution, Spanish thriller Someone Has to Die and, most notably, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Aaron Sorkin’s biopic about a group of anti-Vietnam War protestors featuring an all-star cast including Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

For more, see below for the...

As we get closer and closer to Halloween, most people’s attention will be focused on the spookiest day of the year and the onslaught of horror content that always comes with it, but streaming services have always delivered on the idea of being an entertainment buffet, providing movies and TV shows from all across the spectrum to guarantee that subscribers have something to watch at all times.

Netflix have been no different, and while recently launched titles like Hubie Halloween and The Haunting of Bly Manor are definitely aimed at the Halloween crowd, they couldn’t be more different in terms of how they approach the tropes of the genre. However, it isn’t all about scaring people senseless, and the platform has some great films and TV series arriving over the next seven days that prove that.

The highest profile addition is without a doubt Aaron Sorkin’s...

Netflix has a whole lot of spooks up its sleeve for the month of October.

From Adam Sandler’s “Hubie Halloween” (Oct. 7) to the “Hill House” follow-up “The Haunting of Bly Manor” (Oct. 9), the Halloween-themed goodness is in high supply next month. Watch Netflix’s little teaser reel above.

If you want a gory horror film, try “Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight” (Oct. 28). Other new creepy flicks include “His House” (Oct. 30) “Cadaver” (Oct. 22) and Spanish-language film “The Day of the Lord” (Oct. 30).

For a younger audience, there’s “Vampires vs. the Bronx” (Oct. 2) and “The Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting” (Oct. 15).

In terms of TV, get ready for Volume 2 of Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries” reboot series (Oct. 19), and also check out Season 1 of CBS’ “Evil” (Oct. 1) about a forensic psychologist who comes face to face with evidence that challenges her disbelief in supernatural phenomena.

For some non-Halloween-themed content,...

Netflix was ahead of the game for October, releasing its “Netflix and Chills” horror lineup in anticipation of the Halloween season. Now the streaming giant has unveiled its full lineup for October, and believe it or not: horror remains at the forefront of its strategy.

The biggest release this month is undoubtedly The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan’s long-awaited followup to terrifying Haunting of Hill House. That arrives on Oct. 9. The film side of things is where most of Netflix’s other horror originals reside, with Hubie Halloween (Oct. 7), A Babysitters’ Guide to Monster Hunting (Oct. 15), and Rebecca (Oct. 22) all making their debut.

Some non-horror originals of note this month include high school drama Grand Army (Oct. 16) and the Anya-Taylor Joy-starring chess story The Queen’s Gambit (Oct. 26). Aaron Sorkin’s latest film, The Trial of the Chicago 7, arrives on Oct. 16.

Netflix is adding new library movies like Fargo,...

The full list of everything that’s coming to Netflix in October has been released today and as we’re facing the prospect of a Halloween spent at home, the streaming site is making sure that we’ve got more than enough spooky content to keep us occupied. In fact, there’s a huge amount of new movies and TV shows arriving on the service next month as part of the “Netflix and Chills” season.

October 1st also delivers a lot of great newly licensed content, too, which you won’t want to miss. Sticking with the Halloween theme, though, the haul features a few horrors/thrillers including Cape Fear, House of 1000 Corpses and You Have Always Lived in the Castle. Then, on the 2nd, new original movie Vampires vs. the Bronx lands. And skipping ahead to the 7th, be sure to catch Adam Sandler’s latest comedy, Hubie Halloween.

Madrid — Netflix announced Thursday in Madrid seven new Spanish Originals: Two series, three features, one documentary and an unscripted title.

The titles confirm a rapid ramp-up in production volume for Netflix in Spain, whose output to date takes in two of the U.S. giant’s standout breakouts in international, not only in Spain but overseas “La Casa de Papel” (Money Heist), “High Seas” and “Elite.”

Netflix’s Spanish production output, which boasts the first Netflix European Production hub soundstage complex at Madrid’s Tres Cantosis already one of the most voluminous in the world with 32 current or upcoming productions, according to a September 2019 report by Ampere Analysis. Only the U.K., Japan, Cnada, Mexico and Brazil bettered that figure.

Among the novelties:

* A currently-untitled show, the first series created by renown Spanish film director Daniel Sanchez Arévalo,, described as “an exciting story of friendship and perseverance” in a netflix statement after the presentation.