Netflix Signs Global Exclusive Overall Deal with ‘La Casa de Papel’ Creator Alex Pina
By John Hopewell
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Continuing to tie down key creative talent in international, Netflix has signed a global exclusive overall deal with “La Casa de Papel” creator Alex Pina, announced Thursday out of Spain.
The deal comes less than a month after the U.S. streaming giant announced a similar overall deal, its first in Europe, with Jantse Friese and Baran bo Obdar, creators of German-language Netflix hit “Dark.”
The new deal with Pina, a creative driving force behind, most notably, “” and “Vis a Vis” (Locked Up), will see Pina producing new series and projects exclusively for Netflix. Made exclusively for Netflix, “La Casa de Papel” Part 3 is scheduled for release in 2019. “Sky Rojo,” described by Netflix as a “female action drama,” will go into production in 2019.
Announcing the deal, Erik Barmack, vice president of international originals, said he was certain Pina would continue to cross frontiers with a “unique vision” and “storytelling reaching goal audiences.”
“We are living a moment when series are becoming one of most relevant of cultural movements ever,” Pina added.
He went on: “The possibility of reaching the last corner of earth and pushing back on the U.S. big industry fiction predominance” is “part of the illusion of thousands of creatives around the world.”
The Netflix-Pina deal was in many ways expected. Pina made “La Casa de Papel” which Netflix described in its first quarter results this April as its most-watched foreign-language series ever, a social phenomenon around the world from Argentina to Iran.
But Netflix made Pina. Produced for and with Atresmedia, one of Spain’s top two TV networks, “La Casa de Papel” only, remarkably, scored so-so ratings when aired in free-to-air in Spain. It was only when acquired by Netflix that it took off exploding into a hit so large that when Reed Hastings signed a carriage deal with Telefonica for Spain and Latin America, he tweeted a video clip of the deal signing in which he is jokingly wearing the Salvador Dali mask used by the money mint assailants in “La Casa de Papel.”
