Spanish Government Launches Ambitious Campaign to Promote Booming Film and TV Sectors

Spain is having a moment.

If that sounds familiar, it might be because Spain’s been having a moment for the last few years. The bump came when the government launched the Spain Audiovisual Hub in 2021, offering strategic backing of the industry by pumping 1.6 billion euros ($1.73 billion) into it. 

In the three years since, Spain has made progress on all four of the Hub’s main areas of focus: attracting foreign investments and shoots, improving financial and tax instruments, training talent — especially women — as well as regulatory reforms and the elimination of administrative barriers.

Now, Spain has been designated MIPCOM’s 2024 Country of Honor, and the Spanish government has launched an ambitious campaign called Spain, Where Talent Ignites aimed at boosting the country’s global recognition, reputation and marketability of Spanish productions, and growing business opportunities in an increasingly competitive landscape.

“The aim of the campaign is to associate the Spanish audiovisual industry with talent, creativity, expertise, professionalism and excellence,” says Elisa Carbonell, CEO of ICEX Spain Trade & Investment, a division of the Ministry of Economy, Commerce and Business.

Spain was also just announced as the Country in Focus for the upcoming European Film Market (EFM) at the 75^th Berlin Film Festival in 2025. “The Spanish film and media industry has solidified its reputation and global acclaim to become a European powerhouse thanks to creative excellence, targeted investments, and technological innovations, enjoying a strong international presence with high-quality content and originality,” Berlinale Pro and EFM Director Tanja Meissner tells THR.

The ICEX campaign aims to showcase exactly these qualities, using an innovative short film as an entry point for discovering the country’s creative and technical talents. Titled The Cause of the Accident That Set the Fire and housed alongside a range of talent interviews on the campaign’s website, the 9-minute short turns on a nervous young director (Berta Prieto) overseeing a packed set. Look for cameos and homages as well as a variety of arts on display, from effects to choreography to illustrations. 

“We believe the best way to showcase the excellence of Spain’s audiovisual industry is through the industry’s own language — telling original, engaging stories in an innovative and carefully crafted way,” Carbonell explains. “Talent exists everywhere, but not all countries value it equally.”

Teresa Azcona, managing director of the Audiovisual Cluster of Madrid, who calls Spain “one of the most powerful European producers of content,” highlights Madrid’s role as a talent hub and “engine” for that success. “Spanish production, international productions in Spain, co-production, and made-in-Spain contents are successful around the world and are among the most seen on the various streamers,” she says.

Indeed, four of the top 10 most viewed non-English films of all time on Netflix are from Spain, as are four of the same for series. These include Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, thrillers Nowhere and The Platform, and teen romance Through My Window (numbers three through six on the list, respectively), as well as three seasons of stylish action series Money Heist and its prequel Berlin.

According to a report released Monday at MIPCOM by Parrot Analytics and ICEX,  Netflix, Society of the Snow was the number two movie contributing the most to the streamer’s subscriber renewals and number four to subscriber acquisitions for Netflix in the first quarter of 2024, and Nowhere was the number one non-English film on Netflix in 2023 for subscriber growth in the first 13 weeks of the year.

And it’s not just Netflix. Mystery series Red Queen ranked in the top five new Amazon Prime Video series in 2024 for acquiring and renewing the most subscribers in the first 13 weeks post-release, while Spain-U.S. co-production Land of Women ranked in the top 15 for new Apple TV Plus series in 2024 that drove subscriber growth in the first 10 weeks, the report added.

Spain was also the top producer of fiction titles commissioned by global streamers in Europe in 2022, per the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO). In the US, as of the first quarter of 2024, Spanish was the foreign language with the highest number of movies available on SVOD platforms and third in number of shows (following Korean and Japanese), according to Parrot Analytics. 

The Parrot-ICEX report says that Spain-originated content generated $5.1 billion over the past four years and estimates it will generate $1.4 billion in global revenue in 2024. “There’s no doubt that Spanish audiovisual productions have proven their global reach and universal appeal,” Carbonell says. “This is reflected in festivals and markets, the demand on streaming platforms and the rise in international co-productions.” 

Bayona, who is co-led a keynote at MIPCOM with Elite executive producer Diego Betancor on Tuesday, is one of many “mid-career or emerging talents” who make an appearance in the Where Talent Ignites short, produced by Spanish production company Canadá. Others include Karla Sofía Gascón, star of France’s International Oscar submission and Cannes dual award winner Emilia Pérez, Miguel Herrán of Money Heist and Elite fame, and actress Bárbara Lennie (God’s Crooked Lines). 

Spanish genres especially in demand for series right now, according to executives from some of the more than 50 Spanish companies present in Cannes, include dramas, thrillers, crime mysteries and historical fiction, like RTVE’s Ena, a six-episode series about the Englishwoman (Kimberly Tell) who became Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain in the early 1900s, which had its world premiere at MIPCOM on Monday.

RTVE will also exclusively debut ambitious production Columbus DNA, a doc about the origins of Cristopher Columbus, in Cannes and present Spanish-German mystery thriller series Weiss & Morales as part of an Igniting Global Hits showcase of high-caliber, big-budget co-productions out of Spain. Sequoya Studios’ Zorro, which had a special screening at MIPCOM last year and premiered in Amazon’s top 10, will also be in the showcase. MediaPro is bringing thrillers El Mal Invisible and Celeste, as well as the third season of The Head and box office hit The 47, among others.

Adding to its profile as an audiovisual hub, Spain also continues to be in hot demand as a shooting location: “Spain has the biggest diversity of locations of any country in Europe,” says producer Duncan Muggoch, who served as the foreign line producer in Spain on seasons five to seven of Game of Thrones, considered one of the impetuses behind Spain’s current incentives system, and producer on season eight. “I’m a massive fan of Spain,” he says.

Muggoch also serves as executive producer on Netflix’s The 3 Body Problem, which shot for one week in Spain on season one, after four to five weeks of prep there. An area of Guadalupe stood in for 1960s China. “In the north of Spain, you could do the Alps, you could do Scotland, you could do all sorts of things,” he says. “And in the south of Spain, you could do desert, you could do beautiful Moorish buildings. The cities are stunning, the weather’s good. It’s literally got everything.”

Between 2019 and 2022, 165 incentivized international productions filming in Spain spent at least 1.3 billion euros ($1.41 billion) and generated an estimated minimum of 1.8 billion euros ($1.95 billion) in gross value for the Spanish economy, according to a study released this fall by Olsberg SPI in collaboration with Spanish production services association Profilm.

The report concluded that 70 percent of that expenditure would not have occurred without Spain’s international incentives. These include a 30 percent rebate on the first one million euros ($1.08 million) of eligible expenditure and 25 percent after, or 50 percent/45 percent in the Canary Islands. As of last year, those incentives doubled their ceiling to cap out at 20 million euros ($21.66 million) per film or 10 million euros ($10.83 million) per series episode, not exceeding 50 percent of production costs. 

The higher incentives in the Canaries compensate for sometimes having to bring in crews and equipment from the mainland, producers say. Other areas are launching their own systems. In parts of the northern Basque Country, for example, incentives offer 35-70 percent in tax credits on up to 50-60 percent of production cost estimates, depending on project characteristics.

Still, local service providers insist incentives need to keep improving to compete internationally with countries with better rebates, no caps or less expensive crews. Besides the rebate cap, Muggoch points to a lack of “good studio space” as a potential competitive challenge for Spain: “It’s very hard to take a full show” there “unless you’re completely location-based.” But, he adds, “Spain is a country you go to for location shooting.”

The increased level of investment in Spain thanks to the Hub is also supporting infrastructure investments, from Madrid Content City (which hosts Secuoya Studios and Netflix) and the reopening of Alicante’s Ciudad de la Luz studios, to new studio projects in Catalonia, Mallorca, Galicia and the Basque region, the Olsberg report noted.

The study identified other challenges for Spain, including some needed additional development of workforce skills and experience, and a potential smoothing out of some administrative processes. How the renewed funding of the Hub will take shape next year also remains to be made public.

“I would like to think that in this new stage we will continue to bet on tax incentives that are key for the audiovisual sector, key for attracting international productions, but also for the development of Spanish productions and co-productions,” Audiovisual Cluster of Madrid’s Azcona says, adding that long-term financing should continue to support the stability and growth of Spanish companies, allowing them to “undertake increasingly ambitious projects” and provide “greater stability in employment” for more talents.

But as Spain’s audiovisual sector continues to grow, Carbonell sees an upside to any difficulties that may lay ahead: “The challenges will be many,” she says. “We are living through a transitional phase… However, [these challenges have] also made us grow. So, while this is a time of great challenges, it is also, more than ever, a time of great opportunities.”