Netflix’s ambitious drama “La Bola Negra” will play in theaters for four weeks before hitting the streaming platform.
The film is scheduled to be released in theaters on November 6th and then on Netflix on December 4th. With a release date this fall, Netflix is positioning the film as an awards contender. The streamer picked up La Bola Negra at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered to rave reviews, sparked a bidding war and won the festival’s Best Director award.
This marks one of the broader theatrical efforts for Netflix, which has recently increased its involvement in theaters with certain projects. Later this year, David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, the unofficial title for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel, will play exclusively on Imax for two weeks before being released on Netflix. And in 2027, Greta Gerwig’s The Chronicles of Narnia will become the streamer’s first film to receive a traditional theatrical release.
Directed, co-written and produced by Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrosi (known as Los Javis), La Bola Negra is a bizarre epic spanning 85 years of Spain’s history, from the 1930s to the present day, and is inspired by the unfinished fragments of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. Told in a trilogy, the film chronicles the stories of three men whose lives are connected through desire, loss, and what one generation leaves behind for the next. The ensemble includes Spanish musician Guitari Cala Fuente, who is making his acting debut, and “Elite” actors Miguel Bernardo, Carlos González, Milo Cuifes, Laura Duenas, Julio Torres, Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close.
“When we began writing La Bola Negra, we wanted to tell a story about freedom, heritage, and the importance of LGBTQ+ visibility. Above all, we wanted to honor the generations of people whose courage and sacrifice made today’s freedoms possible,” Calvo and Ambrossi said in a statement. “We can’t think of a better place to bring this story to a national audience than on Netflix. We’re deeply grateful and excited to have that message reach millions of viewers and bring Federico García Lorca’s legacy to audiences around the world. This is the beginning of an extraordinary new chapter for ‘La Bola Negra,’ and we can’t wait for our viewers to discover it.”
