Movistar Plus Drives Into YA Comedy, Smart Social Issue Genre

Over the last two years, no Spanish company has helped drive Spanish content onto the world stage more than Movistar Plus, the biggest Spanish pay TV/SVOD operator.

Since 2025 alone, Movistar Plus Originals have scored the two top prizes at Series Mania with “Querer” and “Celeste,” has earned two Oscar nominations with “Sirāt,” while “La Bola Negra,” another Original, has emerged as the Cannes Festival’s biggest Oscar contender.

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Last week, Movistar Plus garnered International Emmy nominations for Alberto Rodríguez’s “The Anatomy of a Moment” and best actor for Javier Cámara in “Jakarta.”

Such plaudits raise the question of how Movistar Plus moves forward from here. Its key Mipcom titles supply some answers.

Under a new management team — CEO Alfonso Gómez Palacio and contents director Juan Andrés García Romero — Movistar Plus is attempting to reach out to younger audiences. It’s scored one home run, Mipcom title “Many People Need to Die,” the series debut from YouTube-podcast comedian Victoria Martín. A withering take on Millennial angst, it has been an audience and new subscriber driver, says García Romero, noting that Movistar Plus has already ordered a Season 2.

Shot in Catalonia’s heavenly Aran Valley, “Killing a Bear,” another top Mipcom title, underscores another strategic drive: co-production.

Created by Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo (“Crematorium,” “The Zone”), the fact-based wild bear murder mystery that exposes the deep social conflict in the high Pyrenees marks the fourth co-production between Movistar Plus and broadcast network Arte France. Season 2 of “Celeste,” also a Movistar Plus original and another Spanish Mipcom buzz pick, is co-produced with the Mediapro Studio, with the Mediapro Studio Distribution handling international sales.

Movistar Plus‘’’ overseas breakout has rolled off its close relationships with many of Spain’s greatest younger auteurs, giving them the resources to make the films and TV series they envision at a competitive level of across-the-board production values comparable to, for example, France.

On “Celeste” Season 1, ”we were given a marvellous degrees of creative freedom. It could have become a madcap comedy full of gags and jokes made for the broadest of audiences. Instead, we were even encouraged to make a series with light and shade,” says “Celeste” creator Diego San Jose.

That strategy has proved highly successful. In early July, Movistar Plus created waves when it announced that it will double its original Spanish series annual output from eight to 16 titles. “Originals attract more client and generate more engagement,” Movistar Plus noted.

In order to make such series, the pay TV operator has to bring on emerging talent alongside the creatives it already engages. “The Castle,” another new Movistar title at Mipcom, is a case in point: the TV debut of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s longtime co-scribe Isabel Peña as a series co-creator.

“The Castle” shares similarities with “Killing a Bear” and “Celeste.” All three are crime drama-thrillers, the most exportable and ordered of program types, but all three reject tropes of the genre.

“Celeste” turns on a dowdy tax fraud inspector. “The Castle” weighs in like “Zodiac” with sex clubs, detailing the long years spent by a young police inspector to bring to justice a prostitution kingpin. “Killing a Bear” is a “fable” that “uses genre as a vehicle to address the violence born of the deeply polarized conflicts over coexistence we see today,” say the Cabezudo brothers, calling the series a procedural.

Genre provides story tension at a time of general market downturn where series, whatever their hot button issues, must never forget to entertain.