Producers and Industrial Change: Morena Films and Spanish Cinema in the Streaming Era

Beyond even its importance as a constituent of the so-called ‘big five’ Western Europe media economies, Spain has proven itself to be a particularly attractive market for the global SVOD services. Beginning with Netflix’s arrival in 2015 and commissioning of the original series The Cable Girls / Las chicas del cable (Netflix, 2017–2020) shortly thereafter, each of the major global platforms has shown a keen interest in not only growing its subscriber base in Spain, but also investing in original production from the country. These investors include the platforms operated by Silicon Valley technology companies (i.e. Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+), as well as platforms operated as divisions of the legacy Hollywood studios, including Disney+, HBO Max and Lionsgate’s StarzPlay. Speaking to the platforms’ demand for local Spanish content, the European Audiovisual Observatory estimated in 2022 that on a relative basis the country led all of Europe in incoming investment from the global platforms, with such investment constituting some 37% of the audiovisual production in the country, a figure that is more than double the European average of 16% and which is far ahead of the Netherlands, which has the second-biggest figure at 23% (Fontaine 2022, 14). Language has been said to be a particularly important factor in the heightened demand for Spanish audiovisual production, with global platforms seeing such content as appealing for audiences in Latin America as well as the United States, but other factors such as the need to meet European content quotas and the sheer global popularity of series such as Netflix’s Money Heist / La casa de papel (Antena 3/Netflix, 2018–2022) could also be helping to drive this demand. Whatever the exact reasons, Spain has since 2015 seen an unprecedented boom in the production of films and series, driven not only by platform commissions and co-productions, but also aggressive spending on the part of national broadcasters and pay-television players, some of whom have launched their own VOD services and stocked them with original content. This boom came after a penurious first half of the 2010s, a period in which the audiovisual industries grappled with the fallout of the 2011 economic crisis, and has continued despite the economic pressures caused by the Covid 19 pandemic.