Money Heist creator Álex Pina is turning his attention to the super rich in his latest Netflix series, Billionaires’ Bunker, a show he describes as an “amalgamation of soap opera, black comedy, jail drama and thriller.”
The series, which launches Friday, follows some of Spain’s wealthiest individuals as they hide in a specially-built bunker called Kimera Underground Park, facing the imminent threat of nuclear war. Deep underground, tension brews between two families trapped in a claustrophobic environment, while the super rich are attended to by workers dressed in orange. By the end of episode one, a major twist reshapes the direction of the series.
“I think from episode 1 you will be able to see how the show changes tone,” Pina told Deadline from Netflix’s Tres Cantos studio in Madrid. “It becomes more ironic, with the subject matter of rich people escaping the apocalypse to get into a bunker, which is kind of ironic in itself. It works with many different genres. It’s like a Russian Doll, the genres change as you move forward.”
Pina created Billionaires’ Bunker (titled El Refugio Atómico in Spanish) with long-time collaborator Esther Martínez Lobato. The show stars Pau Simón, Alícia Falcó, and Miren Ibarguren.
Pina, who has developed five Netflix shows including Money Heist and its spin-off Berlin, revealed that the idea for Billionaires’ Bunker first came to him during the depths of the pandemic.
“They started building buildings that went 13 floors underground and we thought this was a wonderful reason to tell this story,” he said. “We wanted to make a show that was naughty, witty and about rich people during an apocalypse.”
The claustrophobic environment, a hallmark of Money Heist, remains central to the new series. Pina and Martínez Lobato explained that the setting allows them to push characters to their extremes.
“From a drama perspective you can take all the characters to a more excessive limit,” Pina said. “We are fans of putting as much pressure on as we can and using this physical building where we trap people in time.”
For Martínez Lobato, the bunker acts as a great equalizer. “Those people with an aspirational life outside of a bunker are very different when you put them inside a bunker,” she explained. “Their money becomes almost worthless, so you can dig into their identity, their hearts and their personal relationships. And visually we have two teams wearing two different colors, so you challenge the audience from the beginning of the show.”
Pina, Martínez Lobato, and the team at Vancouver Media tapped into Netflix’s cutting-edge technology at the Tres Cantos facility, and Pina described the effort as “humungous.” Billionaires’ Bunker is the first Spanish Netflix series to use virtual production extensively, with Netflix calling it “one of the most ambitious audiovisual projects [it has] ever undertaken in Spain.” The series was filmed on a multiset spanning more than 7,200 square meters, using 360-degree cameras to capture the dome-like environment. The set could accommodate 300 people and allowed three filming teams to work simultaneously. Within the soundstage, a Zen garden featured an eight-meter-tall bonsai tree, which took over five months to create.
“I think all this shows how much we are at the very top in terms of technology,” Pina said.
Money Heist has long been hailed as a breakout series that helped usher in a wave of non-English-language hits like Squid Game and Lupin.
While no single series may have matched its global impact since, Pina believes international TV shows continue to hold their own.
“I think we can all compete with the English-speaking shows,” he said. “And I think what happened [when Money Heist launched] is still very much enforced. I’m still working on very big TV shows and I feel that we absolutely belong to this universe like any other.”