In early May last year, nearly 150 good people from Spain’s film and television industry, including Pedro Almodovar, Agustín Almodovar, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, and Alejandro Amenábar, signed a joint open letter to support Spain. Domingo Corral, who has just been fired by Telefonica, the giant telecommunications company, as director of fiction and entertainment at Movistar Plus+, Spain’s largest pay TV/SVOD service.
Under Mr. Corral’s groundbreaking creative stewardship, they also produced Arauda Ruiz de Azua’s Querer, which won the top prize at Seriesmania in 2025, and the film that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He also expressed concern about the future of Movistar Plus+, which won River Lux’s Jury Prize winner Sirāt in 2025 and has gone on to produce series and films that put Spain on the international stage. name. Movistar Plus+ once again won top praise for Luis de Azua’s “Sundays” in San Sebastian in September.
Now, nearly 11 months later, Corral is making waves again. On Tuesday, in one of Seriesmania’s biggest news of the year, HBO Max’s head of original content Sarah Aubrey announced a first-look deal with Corral for an “exclusive television service in Spain.”
Her first project, she told Series Mania Masterclass, was a series focusing on El Nani, a young petty criminal who disappeared while in police custody in 1983. The trial involving Francoist throwback police criminals became a show trial for Spain’s young democracy. The Nani series is written and directed by Alberto Rodríguez and Rafael Cobos, who once again enjoyed success in the main competition at Seriesmania with The Anatomy of a Moment from Corral’s Movistar Plus+.
Under Aubrey, HBO Max has taken on the responsibility of being HBO. There are all signs that by partnering with HBO Max, Domingo Corral can continue to be Domingo Corral.
“What are you looking for?” Aubrey was asked during the master class. “The answer is always the best stories by the best creators,” she replied.
Corral’s career is just that, with films such as Mobile Police and The New, directed by Rodrigo Sologoen, who was later selected for Venice, along with series by Alfonso Cuaron, Joe Wright and Thomas Vinterberg. Years”, and produced Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s “La Mesias” series, which won again at Series Mania and surprised French critics, and was praised by the newspaper Libération in 2024. as “one of the most beautiful series of the year”.
Considering a series like The Last of Us airs around the world, Aubrey is a series buff and says, “Local shows don’t have the same pressure to reinvent themselves to become global staples. Frankly, that’s a recipe for disaster. I’m a big believer in making shows tailored to the audience and making them specific. And if that’s the case, they’ll be successful no matter where they’re seen.”
During the nearly 10 years that Corral was producing the series for Movistar Plus, they set out to discover Spain, its settings, styles, concerns, history, and talents. At the same time, they celebrated the voluntarist voice and were produced at budget levels that could compete with production levels in France and Italy.
The artistic ambition of the series Corral has created is astonishing. For example, each episode of “The Anatomy of a Moment,” co-produced with Arte France, takes on a different genre tinge. For example, episode 1 presents itself as a political thriller with horror tropes, depicting Prime Minister Adolfo Saules’ struggle to persuade or bribe the Francoist parliament to vote to abolish the bill in 1976.
That’s not to say Anatomy is a niche piece of high art. Late last year, it gave Movistar Plus+ the biggest Movistar Plus+ original bow ever.
With Spanish broadcasters and pay-TV operators cutting back on budgets, turning more to non-fiction or ditching scripted productions like public broadcaster RTVE altogether, global streaming services may be the only ones with the funds to make series the way Corral wants. That includes deep development. But as mentioned in the Series Mania Masterclass, one of the first things Aubrey did in the role was increase the development budget.
But the HBO Max and Corral deal raises two big questions.
So far, the Nani series is well within Rodriguez and Cobos’ comfort zone. They have spent much of their career as directors and screenwriters examining the concept of transition in Spanish history in very subtle ways. How a police officer with a Francoist past worked with forward-thinking colleagues just after Spain became a democracy in 1977 (“Marshland”). How Spain was able to pivot towards modernity, and how it failed to do so (The Plague), and how it did so even though its democracy was at stake (Anatomy of the Moment).
Cobos has also just released his first feature as a director, the brilliantly stylish Golpes, set in 1982 and interspersed with historical documentary footage of the period, and anti-hero Migheli, which features another El Nani-like character, a marginalized working-class criminal who commits robberies in the early ’80s, driven by a vague desire for freedom and an instinctive contempt for authority and middle-class conventions.
But the Nani project is more than just one project. This is a high-profile collaboration between the two creators who gave Movistar Plus+ its first marquee series “The Plague” set in Seville in 1580, one of Movistar Plus+’s early Spanish film hits “Prison 1977”, a standout episode of the innovative lockdown collective series “Offworld”, and Movistar Plus+’s 2nd place at the French Television Festival. “The Plague,” directed by Kobos, won the Cannes series award for best short format. “The Left-Handed Son” is a moving portrait of a Seville mother and son, woven through their frustration and search for human warmth and respect.
So, after this signature collaboration between Rodríguez, Cobos and Corral, the first question is: how many other of Spain’s talented young film and television creators will end up working with Corral, including Sorogoyen, Luis de Azua, Zajavis and Laxé?
“It was a natural fit for us to have someone with such deep talent relationships, such great track record and taste, working with us in finding new projects,” Aubrey said during the masterclass.
But how many projects Corral can run may depend on the second question. How long will HBO Max remain HBO under Paramount’s ownership through its acquisition of WBD?The simple answer to that is no one knows. But the answer will determine, in part, the international future of the truly groundbreaking, auteur-empowering television work that both HBO and Coral have become famous for.
