Spain Touts Books as 'Safe IP' for Global Adaptations
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- Fernando Benzo, secretary general of the Spanish Federation of Publishers, will argue the case for Spanish literature as screen IP at the Shanghai Film Festival's June 21 session "Stories Travel Further – Literature and Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue"
- Spanish-language books reach a potential market of 600 million readers, and Benzo cites Netflix's global hit "Money Heist" ("La Casa de Papel") as proof that Spanish stories travel regardless of setting
- Lorenzo Silva's Bevilaqua and Chamorro police procedural series has clear screen potential in Benzo's view; Silva's novel "Carte Blanche" was already adapted into a film by Gerardo Herrero that screened at this year's Cannes Marché du Film
- Benzo's own thriller "Los Perseguidos" was spotted by a producer and turned into a successful audio drama, a format he flags as a cost-effective route for adaptation
- Spain produces roughly 430 films a year, but only a small share are adaptations — a gap Benzo frames as the country's most underexploited audiovisual asset
- Contemporary Spanish thrillers have moved beyond local Civil War themes to become "universal," portable to London or Scotland, which Benzo says is exactly why they sell globally
- Publishers must learn Netflix-style three-minute pitches or risk losing the room: "If you stall for a moment, you have lost a minute and a half, and the pitching is over," Benzo warns
Why it matters: Benzo is positioning Spain's publishing sector as a strategic supplier to the global content pipeline at a moment when streamers are aggressively chasing pre-existing IP. With Spain already producing roughly 430 films a year and a proven crossover hit in "Money Heist," the bottleneck he identifies is not creative quality but publisher–producer fluency — a fixable gap that could redirect adaptation spend toward Spanish-language source material.
