Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrosio’s ‘The Black Ball’ collected $277,500 between October 16 and 18 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The data was provided by Netflix, which did not release the box office for one of its movies until Sunday. But in this case, the platform felt it was time to be transparent with the statistics.
What does this mean? $69,375 per screen. That same weekend, the highly anticipated A24 documentary ‘You Can See Everything’ about Elizabeth Holmes added nearly 15 million in 855 theaters, an average of just under $18,000 per theater. Netflix claims that only ‘Parasites’ achieved a better average among non-English language films, and none in Spanish reached such heights. One of these four theaters is the Paris Theater in Manhattan, which Netflix has leased for ten years and which screens all films in 35mm. The expansion will hit 300 theaters across the country on November 6.
K-pop precedent. Fourteen months ago, Netflix acted very differently. From Aug. 22 to 24, 2025, the karaoke version of ‘The K-Pop Warriors’ grossed between $17 and $18 million in 1,700 North American theaters, according to rival studios’ estimates. Netflix didn’t provide statistics for this extraordinary success, so official box office rankings such as ComScore awarded the weekend victory to ‘Weapon’, with 15.4 million. Previously, Netflix also did not collect public collections for ‘Roma’, ‘The Irishman’ or ‘Glass Onion’. One possible reason for this oversight: In April 2025, Ted Sarandos called going to the movies “an outdated concept.”
It’s not from Netflix. ‘The Black Ball’ is a film by Movistar Plus and Suma Content Films, co-produced with El Desio and Le Pact. It reached 28.6 million at the Spanish box office last weekend and surpassed ‘Torrente, Presidente’ as the highest-grossing Spanish film of the year. Netflix only has the distribution rights for the US: it bought them in Cannes for around five million dollars after beating out A24 and Mubi in the tender.
Because of There is a possible lesson for this change of attitude of Netflix: the company has already introduced transparency with proven success in other markets, was acquired cheaply and has a budget between 15 and 17 million (which, in addition, was financed by others). The collection turns the published data into a sales tool for shows and creators, though Netflix determines exactly which numbers are shown.
And more to come. In September we learned that Netflix will release the box office for six releases, including ‘The Black Ball’, David Fincher’s ‘Cliff Booth’, Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’, scheduled for February 2027 and ‘Charlie vs the Chocolate Factory’ in November of the same year. These last two, blockbusters with aspirations of finding a wider audience in theaters, probably pushed this newly released transparency. The decision comes at a difficult time for the platform, which has cut about 6% of its workforce, about 1,000 jobs, including its director of content, Bela Bazaria, with whom it has been with for ten years.
Spain is something else. Here, despite its undisputed triumph at the box office, the film has been embroiled in the inevitable controversy due to its theme, setting and political stance, leading media such as El Debate to describe it as “a caricature of the Civil War in a ‘caricature'”. That is, we find ourselves once again with the eternal generational conflict created by films that contemplate historical conflict in an uncomfortable way. Netflix seems to have realized something: When it reported the box office, it highlighted that 51% of its first weekend viewers were under 35 years old.
In Xataka | Netflix has announced layoffs of nearly 1,000 workers, about 6% of its workforce
