Netflix wins Toronto's top audience prize for the first time with queer Spanish epic "La Bola Negra"

The Toronto International Film Festival closed its 51st edition on Sept. 20 by handing its top audience honor, the People's Choice Award, to "La Bola Negra," a Spanish-language epic about three generations of gay men that Netflix has spent months positioning as its strongest Oscar contender in years. It is the first time in the award's history that a Netflix production has won, ending a decade in which the streamer's high-profile festival entries — including "Roma," "Marriage Story" and "The Power of the Dog" — placed but never topped the ballot.

Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the filmmaking duo known in Spain as "Los Javis," the film finished ahead of two other American awards-season hopefuls: Peter Farrelly's "I Play Rocky" took first runner-up and Siân Heder's "Being Heumann" placed second. The People's Choice Award is decided entirely by ballots cast by festival ticket holders after public screenings, rather than by a jury, which is part of why the prize has become one of the industry's most closely watched early signals of the Academy Awards race. Recent winners that went on to Best Picture nominations include "Green Book," "12 Years a Slave," "The King's Speech" and "Slumdog Millionaire," the last three of which also won, according to a history of the prize.

The numbers

"La Bola Negra" arrives in Toronto already carrying an unusual amount of institutional weight for a foreign-language release. It shared the Cannes Film Festival's directing prize this past May with Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski, according to the official awards list published by the Cannes festival, which credited Calvo and Ambrossi "ex-æquo" for the Prix de la Mise en Scène. Weeks later, Spain's film academy selected the movie over rival contenders "El Ser Querido," from Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and "Los Domingos," from Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, to represent the country in the Academy Awards' international feature category, a decision announced by the Academia de Cine on Sept. 16. Netflix has since committed to a 47-day theatrical run beginning Oct. 16, ahead of a Dec. 2 streaming debut — the widest theatrical release the company has given any film, surpassing the 30-day window it gave "Marriage Story" in 2019. The film carries a reported production budget of roughly €15 million, modest by Netflix awards-campaign standards, and runs close to two and a half hours across three interwoven timelines: 1932, 1937 and 2017.

How the film came together

The screenplay, credited to Calvo, Ambrossi and playwright Alberto Conejero, draws its title and premise from an unfinished novel that Federico García Lorca was reportedly working on before his execution by Nationalist forces early in the Spanish Civil War, as well as from Conejero's earlier stage play "La Piedra Oscura." The finished film traces three men across separate eras whose lives are shaped by repression, desire and the long aftershocks of Lorca's death, threading a tribute to the poet's unfinished work through a contemporary story of queer identity. It was shot on 35mm across locations in Castile, Cantabria and Granada and produced by Suma Content Films alongside Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar's El Deseo and the French distributor Le Pacte. The ensemble is led by the musician-turned-actor Guitarricadelafuente in his screen debut, along with Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González and Milo Quifes, with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close appearing in supporting roles that have drawn their own awards buzz since the film's premiere.

The movie's road to Toronto began at Cannes in May, where it drew one of the festival's longest standing ovations of the year and left critics debating whether its sweep and ambition amounted to a genuine achievement or overreach. The following month it also took the international narrative prize in the Sydney Film Festival's audience-voted GIO Awards, decided by more than 24,900 ballots, making Toronto its third major audience-choice trophy of the year. Reviews compiled since have been largely favorable — the film holds strong marks on aggregation sites — though several critics, writing about its Cannes premiere, described stretches of the nearly 150-minute runtime as overwrought, likening its scale to an earlier era of self-consciously prestige filmmaking even as they praised its craft.

For Netflix, the win matters beyond a single trophy. The company has spent close to a decade trying to convert its streaming dominance into Academy Award legitimacy, funding elaborate theatrical and awards campaigns for films such as "Roma," "The Irishman" and "Maestro" without ever claiming the industry's biggest prize outright. A People's Choice win — a category no Netflix film had previously topped — gives the studio its most credible evidence yet that a streaming-first release can win over the same paying audiences that traditional studios rely on to build Oscar momentum, at a moment when Netflix has also pledged to begin publicly reporting box-office figures for a slate of its theatrical releases. The result also lands as a milestone for Spanish cinema: "La Bola Negra" is Spain's official submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, joining a list of past Spanish entries that includes four eventual winners in the category, most recently "The Sea Inside" in 2004, according to a list of the country's past Oscar submissions. For theatrical exhibitors, who have long complained that Netflix treats cinemas as an afterthought, the 47-day commitment is being read as a modest but notable concession.

Reaction and what comes next

Calvo and Ambrossi were in Spain promoting the film's domestic release and did not travel to Toronto for the ceremony. A statement from the directors was read on their behalf by TIFF chief executive Cameron Bailey.

"So knowing that audiences have connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive."

The quote, relayed by the directors through festival organizers, reflected a recurring theme in the film's reception this year: that its emotional reach with general audiences — first in Cannes' public screenings, then in Toronto's ticketed halls — has consistently outpaced its reviews from professional critics, who have been more divided. Canadian outlets covering the ceremony, including public broadcaster CBC and Toronto news station CP24, noted that the win extends a run of international titles taking the prize after several years dominated by English-language contenders.

The film's commercial rollout is now the immediate story. It opens in Spanish theaters on Sept. 25, ahead of the U.S. and Canadian theatrical debut on Oct. 16 in a platform release beginning in New York and Los Angeles before expanding. The Academy's shortlist for Best International Feature Film is due Dec. 15, with the five nominees in that category announced Jan. 21 as part of the wider nominations for the 99th Academy Awards, whose ceremony is scheduled for March 14 in Los Angeles. "La Bola Negra" is widely expected to clear the international feature shortlist given Spain's selection and its Cannes and Toronto results, but its bigger test — and the one that will determine whether Toronto's audience vote holds up as a predictor once again — is whether it can also crack the Best Picture and directing races, categories the film's distributor has been building toward since before its Cannes premiere. Netflix has several other awards-season titles competing for the same voters' attention this fall, meaning the studio's own internal campaign resources, not just the Academy's taste, may help decide how far "La Bola Negra" ultimately travels.