At this 12 months’s San Sebastian Music Pageant, no firm has a stronger dissemination of its works than Telefonica’s home platform and super-producer Movistar Plus+. The group brings a movie in competitors for the pageant, a premium sequence I Am Nevenka, a thriller for a broad viewers Querer, Celeste and a documentary about Spain’s saneest restaurant, Mugaritz”.
These various tasks underline Movistar Plus+’s robust new content material plans, as the corporate more and more strikes into non-fiction, changing into a pacesetter in Spain and launching its first movie in January. Spain’s largest state investor is not pulling out content material; in actual fact, it is digging in.
Over the previous decade, Movistar Plus+ has each elevated the quantity of content material it produces and diversified the forms of productions it helps. Within the early days of streaming, Movistar Plus+ was a pioneer in native manufacturing, investing bigger budgets in tv manufacturing than ever earlier than. Early exhibits like “The Plague” and “Large” seemed like Hollywood-produced sequence however retained a real Spanish spirit and setting that resonated with native audiences.
Now, the corporate is doing the identical with its pipeline of theatrical productions.
“The success of our premium sequence offers us daring confidence,” mentioned Domingo Corral, Director of Fiction and Leisure Content material at Movistar Plus+. “We have now dabbled on the planet of movie earlier than, with movies like Wartime and Jail 77, however now we wish to make filmmaking a constant a part of our annual technique, producing 5 to 6 movies a 12 months.”
Corral mentioned: “The final step on this part is to create occasion theater. Songs like ‘I’m Nevenka’ present our dedication to go additional than earlier than. “Nevenka” director Icíar Bollaín mentioned that this dedication created her expertise Top-of-the-line working situations I’ve ever had. “Movistar was very supportive of the movie and allowed us to do a really tough shoot. We shot in Bilbao, Zamora and throughout England. The movie can be set within the 12 months 2000, So each element needed to be taken care of, from the automobiles to the development, to the make-up, the hair and the costumes, all of which made it dearer, however they have been very supportive of something we wanted,” Boline mentioned.
One other benefit Movistar Plus+ gives its video games is a well-oiled advertising machine.
“They’ve a robust promotion construction at Movistar Plus+ that no different Spanish group can match. For a theatrical movie to be marketed on Spanish tv is a large increase,” Bollaín added.
Whereas the field workplace success of “I Am Nevenka” or the excessive rankings of its sequence are what Movistar Plus+ hopes for, they don’t seem to be essentially what the corporate is striving for. Corral mentioned that for him, the definition of success could also be totally different from a business-driven international platform.
“I need Movistar to be a spot that surprises audiences. The place they’ll discover nice tales that excite them and have robust characters,” the chief mentioned.
Movistar Plus+’s upcoming documentary “Mugaritz” in regards to the nation’s most well-known restaurant is certain to shock its subscribers. Relatively than rent a filmmaker with a prolonged nonfiction resume, the corporate employed horror director and “REC” director Paco Plaza to helm the undertaking.
“What we’re doing now’s diversification,” Corral mentioned. “I cherished bringing in a improbable horror filmmaker like Paco and having him inform the story of a restaurant and take a look at the philosophy behind the world-famous Mugarits.”
In truth, Movistar Plus+’s range creates the most important assortment of native unique content material on any platform domestically or globally. In line with a survey by Spanish analysis firm GECA, Movistar Plus+ premiered 28 new Spanish-language video games between September 2023 and June 2024, topping the record, together with Prime Video (twenty fourth), different Spanish platform Atresplayer (20) and RTVE Play (19) in addition to international streamers corresponding to Netflix (12), Max (8) and Disney+ (7).
