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Beta Fiction Spain, the No. 1 independent distributor in the country this year thanks to a barn-storming €8.0 million ($8.3 million) box office gross from Arantxa Echevarría’s “Undercover,” is set to produce new films from Marcel Barrena and Dani de la Orden, directors of two other big 2024 Spanish breakouts: “El 47” and “A House in Flames.”
With Echevarría attached to direct biopic “Dolores,” Beta Fiction Spain now has in development movies by three of the five directors behind films nominated for Best Picture at Feb. 8’s Spanish Academy Goya Awards.
In all, Beta Fiction Spain releases look set to gross a total €15.2 million ($15.8 million) at Spanish theaters, a considerable achievement given it only launched in May 2022 and released just seven films in 2024, compared to the dozen or so titles it plans to open in Spain from 2025, its first full year of business.
Fresh off “El 47,” a Mediapro Studio production which punched €3.2 million ($3.3 million) for distributor A Contracorriente Films, Barrena is now writing with “El 47” co-scribe Alberto Marini (“La Unidad”) the screenplay for a feature film entitled “La Roja.”
Popular on Variety Much further upstream in development, De la Orden’s project follows up “A House on Fire,” a dramedic take on a dysfunctional Catalan family which scored €3.1 million ($3.2 million) this year in Spain. The new title is a “big, big project, based on a true story and best-selling book that has gone through 14 editions, which will have a big name Spanish cast,” said Beta Fiction Spain Managing Director Pablo Nogueroles. Beta Fiction aims to shoot both new films in fall 2025.
Marcel Barrena’s New Film: ‘La Roja’
Pitched to Beta Fiction before “El 47” was released this September, Barrena’s new film, “La Roja” is “a feel-good dramedy with social elements a la ‘Full Monty,’ but based on true facts like ‘El 47,’” said Mercedes Gamero, CEO of Beta Fiction Spain.
“La Roja” comes in on immigration from a novel angle, turning on “the people who were a considerable part of the Spanish national cricket team, from Pakistan and India,” she added.
Spaniards were struck at the time from shots of these players lined up as the Spanish national anthem played, representing a new country, noted Nogueroles.
“We’re telling the story in a comic, but dramatic way about immigrants who come to Spain trying to find a better life but can find themselves working 18 hours a day, having difficulties in socializing but playing a sport they love and representing a country which is new to them,” he added.
The Spanish cricket team anticipates the flowering of Spain’s Euro 2024 winning national soccer team, two whose young stars are Nico Williams, who was born to Ghanian parents, and Lamine Yamal, whose father is Moroccan and mother from Africa’s Equatorial Guinea.
“Spaniards are proud of La Roja,” said Nogueroles of the name used also of the national soccer team. “Our national teams are made up of ever more people that come from other places,” he said.
Through “La Roja,” “Marcel and Alberto want to talk about the new reality of what Spain looks like, which Spaniards are waking up to,” he added.
Beta Fiction Production & Releases in 2025
In further news, Spanish pubcaster RTVE, pay TV/SVOD player Movistar Plus+ and Catalan government’s ICEC have boarded “Cronos,” produced by Nostromo Pictures and to be directed by Fernando González Molina. Marini has finished the screenplay and the movie is now fully financed, Gamero noted.
In all, nine movies have been given releases dates for 2025, including “We Live in Time,” starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, which opens on New Year’s Day, Stephen King adaptation “The Monkey” from “Longlegs” director Osgood Perkins (Feb. 21), Nick Hamm’s “Guillermo Tell” (April 4) and “Four Letters of Love,” with Helena Bonham Carter, Fionn O’Shea, Pierce Brosnan, Ann Skelly and Gabriel Byrne (April 25).
Daniel Minahan’s “On Swift Horses,” with Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar-Jones bows July 25, David Yarovesky’s “Locked,” with Anthony Hopkins and Bill Skarsgard, hits Spanish testers on Aug. 22.
Spanish releases take in “Sigue Mi Voz,” a teen romance and identity drama adapting “Through My Window” Wattpad author Ariana Godoy, David Serrano’s “Voy a pasármelo Mejor,” a comedic musical (July 17) and “Coartadas S.L,” shooting from March with a big Spanish star and a remake of Philippe Lacheau’s frenzied French gross-out film franchise which has sold over 8 million tickets in France.
Marcel Barrena and Dani de la Orden Courtesy of Beta Fiction Spain Beta Fiction Spain’s Roadmap
News of the Barrena and De la Orden projects comes as Beta Fiction sketched out to Variety a roadmap for the future.
One crux is a continued focus on commercial quality films aimed at adult audiences and filmmakers who can deliver them.
“El 47” has scored 14 Spanish Academy Goya nominations, more than any other candidate this year, followed by “Undercover” with 13. “A House in Flames” has eight.
If the three movies have anything in common, they are films which connect with not only audiences but the press and critics and at awards, Gamero observed.
All three have “very strong characters” and two are based on true facts with a social element attached, she said of “Undercover,” about a real-life woman police officer who infiltrated Basque terrorist org ETA at the age of 20, and “El 47,” which turns on Manolo Vital, a bus driver in Barcelona’s main public transport operator, who drove a bus on the 47 route to Torre Baró, an outlying neighbourhood of Barcelona, to prove wrong his operator’s argument that the bad state of the streets, and their steep tight curves, meant that they couldn’t accommodate buses. With the trip becoming a mass public protest, the operator was forced to recant.
“True stories with true-life characters makes them very relatable to audiences. ‘A House on Fire’ may be fiction but it explores archetypes in Catalan society,” Gamero added.
Beta Fiction Spain will produce or co-produce half of its releases. That emphasis on Spanish productions is highly logical. However high profile, international independent productions’ box office normally pales when compared to that of national hits. The highest-grossing international movie distributed by an independent distributor in Spain in 2024 was “The Substance,” which punched €3.5 million ($3.6 million).
Another key is marketing. On “Undercover,” Beta Fiction took a large billboard two years running at September’s San Sebastián Festival, the first 13 months before the film’s release. It also created four posters during the campaign, plus a pre-teaser trailer, a teaser trailer and a trailer.
Nogueroles served for 16 years as managing director and senior VP at Warner Bros. Entertainment Spain, working for eight years before that at Yelmo Cineplex as head of marketing and development. Gamero was head of acquisitions and sales at broadcaster Atresmedia Group, responsible for the export of “Money Heist” and “Veneno” as well as managing director of production-distribution house Atresmedia Cine, a producer on “Palm Trees in the Snow” and Goya Best Picture winner “Marshland.”
Meshed with their marketing savvy and energetic investment, as reputed members of the Spanish film industry, they have forged excellent relations with other powerful local partners. The idea for “Infiltrada,” for example, was brought to Beta Fiction by producer María Luisa Gutiérrez at Bowfinger International Pictures where she partners with Santiago Segura, and behind Segura co-written and starring “Father There Is Only One,” the most successful current film series in Spain. Bowfinger also produced “La Familia Benetton,”
On the upcoming thriller “Cronos,” set in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 Ramblas Barcelona terrorist attack and one of Beta Fiction’s biggest productions in 2025, Beta Fiction partners as a producer with Adrián Guerra and Nuria Vall’s Nostromo Pictures, which produced “Palm Trees in the Snow” and “Through My Window,” Netflix’s No. 5 most watched non-English movie ever.
Beta Fiction is also distinguished by its ambition. “We want to be in a position in which we can make Spanish films like we had done in our past lives, like ‘Palm Trees in the Snow’ or ‘Marshland,’ bigger films, more films that have potential to travel,” said Gamero, citing “Monte Cristo” as its gold standard.
How to make such films is one of the biggest challenges of Spanish cinema. Beta Fiction is certainly on the case.
Mercedes Gamero and Pablo Nogueroles Courtesy of Beta Fiction Spain
