Netflix released box office grosses publicly for the first time in company history last weekend, publishing figures for its Spanish Cannes winner La Bola Negra after its October 16 theatrical debut. The film earned $277,500 across four theaters in New York and Los Angeles, with a per-screen average of $69,375. That ranks as the 91st-highest debut average of all time and the second-highest ever recorded for a non-English-language film, behind only Parasite.
The disclosure represents a departure from years of opacity. Netflix has mounted theatrical campaigns before, but it has never made official box office figures public the way major studios do. Variety called the shift "a major shift in the theatrical tides." Spencer Klein, Netflix's global head of theatrical distribution, oversaw the new reporting approach.
Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the Spanish filmmakers known as Los Javis, La Bola Negra is based on an unfinished Federico García Lorca play of which only four pages survive. Starring Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, the film received the Best Director prize at Cannes and won the People's Choice Award at TIFF. It is Spain's submission for Best International Feature at the 2027 Oscars. In exit surveys, 96% of audiences rated it Excellent or Very Good.
Netflix acquired the film for approximately $5 million out of Cannes and gave it a 47-day exclusive theatrical window. That surpasses the 30-day window the company gave Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story in 2019, Netflix's previous record. The film expands to additional markets over the coming weeks ahead of a wider release on November 6 and arrives on Netflix on December 2. The company plans to publish grosses for its growing theatrical slate, including forthcoming releases from David Fincher and Greta Gerwig.
