Netflix Debuts Trailer for “La Bola Negra” Ahead of October Theatrical Rollout

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 5, 2026 — Netflix has released the U.S. trailer for La Bola Negra (The Black Ball), the sweeping Spanish-language epic that has been gathering awards-season momentum since the spring. The streamer confirmed the film’s rollout alongside the trailer: a limited theatrical opening in Los Angeles and New York on October 16, 2026 — the longest theatrical window Netflix has ever given one of its movies — followed by a streaming debut on December 2.

The film is directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the duo known as Los Javis, who shared the Best Director prize at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It then won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival — the first Netflix film ever to take Toronto’s top audience prize — and Spain has selected it as its official submission for Best International Feature at the 99th Academy Awards.

A century, three lives

La Bola Negra adapts unfinished material by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca into a three-part story set in 1932, 1937 and 2017, tracing the lives of gay men across nearly a century of Spanish history. The screenplay, by Calvo, Ambrossi and Alberto Conejero, draws on Lorca’s unfinished play of the same name and Conejero’s play La Piedra Oscura, weaving them into a historical melodrama about sexuality, repression, memory and inheritance.

The three strands: Carlos, played by Milo Quifes, struggling to find his place in 1930s Spain; Sebastián, played by Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, finding an unexpected connection amid the Spanish Civil War; and Alberto, played by Carlos González, uncovering a family secret decades later that links the present to a history others tried to bury.

The ensemble around them is formidable: Miguel Bernardeau, Lola Dueñas, Julio Torres, Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. The producers are Calvo, Ambrossi and Jorge Pezzi. Shot on 35mm — with select theaters screening the film in 35mm — the 155-minute production is a large-scale international co-production with original music, and it looks like it: this is maximalist, unabashedly grand filmmaking, the kind Los Javis have always reached for.

The Lorca inheritance

The film’s engine is Lorca himself — the gay writer who rose to fame in the 1920s as a member of Spain’s Generation of ’27, and who was murdered in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War by followers of Francisco Franco. His body has never been found. La Bola Negra pays tribute to him not as a biopic but as an inheritance story: what survives, what gets buried, and who does the burying. That the film’s three eras — 1932, 1937, 2017 — bracket the poet’s death and echo into the present is the point.

The festival run

The momentum began at Cannes in May, where the film world-premiered in Competition, earned a reported 20-minute standing ovation, and won Los Javis the Best Director prize — shared with Paweł Pawlikowski. Netflix acquired the project out of Cannes and has since run a full awards campaign behind it.

Then Toronto. At the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, La Bola Negra won the People’s Choice Award, beating first runner-up I Play Rocky and second runner-up Being Heumann. The victory carries real weight: launched in 1978, the TIFF People’s Choice is one of the most reliable Academy Awards predictors in existence — only one winner in the last decade has missed out on a Best Picture nomination. It is also the first non-English-language film to win the honor since 2011.

Then San Sebastián: on September 26, the film won the City of Donostia Audience Award with a 9.40 audience score, the highest among the competing films. Three festivals, three audience or directing prizes — that is what “people seem to actually like this movie” looks like in awards-season data.

The trailer — and the bet Netflix is making

The new trailer, which touts the TIFF People’s Choice win, has been doing real numbers: film account DiscussingFilm’s post sharing it passed 190,000 views within days. The theatrical rollout — New York and Los Angeles on October 16, expanding to additional U.S. and Canadian markets through October and November — is Netflix’s longest theatrical window to date, a signal of how seriously the company is taking this film’s awards prospects. It currently sits on Best Picture prediction lists at Variety, IndieWire and TheWrap.

The company isn’t putting all its chips on one title: Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love is Netflix’s other prominent early contender, and the official nominations won’t arrive until January 2027. But La Bola Negra — a Cannes directing winner, Spain’s Oscar selection, and a consecutive run of major audience prizes — is the one with the momentum.

What to watch for

The film opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 16; the 35mm screenings will be the ones the cinephiles chase. It arrives on Netflix in the U.S. and Canada on December 2. Between now and then, the campaign will do what campaigns do — but the film has something most campaigns can’t manufacture: audiences who have already voted, twice, with their feet.

Netflix has a busy fall: Ben Affleck’s “Animals” arrives October 9, and the awards-season calendar is filling fast — see the December 18 “Dunesday” showdown and our weekend box office roundup. For more trailer coverage, see the new “Sense and Sensibility” trailer.

More movies coverage at Previously’s news hub.