As the Oscars race continues to gather momentum, some of the top contenders for the biggest prize are starting to catch the eyes of film fans everywhere. As Netflix continues to try its hand at winning Academy gold, following on from the three wins for 2025’s Frankenstein(Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling), they are placing almost all of its hope in the hands of filmmaking duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi and their subversive war drama, La Bola Negra.
Of all the most likely candidates for the Best Picture crown next year, a race led by Christopher Nolan‘s epic adaptation of Homer‘s The Odyssey, La Bola Negra is many people’s second favorite. The film has received widespread praise from critics, becoming “certified fresh” on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. In Victoria Luxford‘s review for Collider, she called the film a “clear frontrunner for many categories at the Oscars,” adding that “the hype surrounding this imperfect but memorable saga is more than justified.”
With hype comes strong word of mouth, which has already seen the movie make box office history by encouraging Netflix to release big-screen figures. Still in the early days of the film’s global screen presence, it continues to impress, having now become the third highest-grossing Spanish film of all time at Spain’s domestic box office. This is thanks to a €36.7 million ($41.0 million) haul so far, which falls short of just Emilio Martínez-Lázaro’s Ocho Apellidos Vascos and J.A. Bayona’s Lo Imposible in the ranks. Penélope Cruz, Glenn Close, Milo Quifes, Álvaro Lafuente Calvo, and Miguel Bernardeau feature in La Bola Negra.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
Penélope Cruz Has Another Oscars Contender
The brilliant Cruz is heading into awards season with double the chance of winning gold. Not only is La Bola Negra a favorite in several categories, but Olivia Wilde‘sThe Invite looks set to pick up writing and acting nominations, perhaps even for Cruz herself. A remake of the Spanish-language feature The People Upstairs, the film dazzled critics earlier this year and continues to gather momentum as voting nears, with some even predicting it to sneak into the line-up of ten Best Picture nominees.
La Bola Negra is the third highest-grossing Spanish film of all time at Spain’s domestic box office. Stay tuned to Collider for more.
