Domingo Corral On His HBO Deal And Why Quality TV Can Be Commercial

Former Movistar Plus content boss Domingo Corral sees his production deal with HBO Max as the route to realising an ambition to make independent TV and film that is both mainstream and premium in quality.

His shock exit from the Telefonica-owned Movistar after 11 years in May 2025 was followed in March with the announcement that his new career as an independent producer was taking off with a HBO production deal in place.

“Right now, I don’t plan to make many things,” says Coral in an exclusive interview with Deadline at the MIA Market in Rome. “I have this deal, and I feel very lucky because I’ve found a place where they share the same vision that I do. It’s very important that you share the same vision with the commissioner.”

Announced at Series Mania this year, Sîrat exec producer Corral will work HBO Max originals exec Sarah Aubrey and Casey Bloys, both now part of senior content team at the merged Skydance business, to create scripted TV an film productions. The first project is about the disappearance of petty criminal El Nani (aka Santiago Correla) in 1980s Spain during the country’s transition out of dictatorship and into democracy.

“After my exit [from Movistar], you always feel bruised,” he adds. “You think, ‘My God, what’s going to happen now?’ But I felt very lucky. For me, HBO is not just a client; it’s a group of people who share the same vision and very similar sensibilities.”

Guiding Corral’s outlook is his experience at Movistar, where the Spanish production community fell in love with him and his commissioning team for their approach of demanding festival-quality storytelling with the mainstream ambition of attracting big audiences. In that sense, he meshes well with the mantra at HBO.

“I ran original production at Movistar for 11 years within a telecommunications company – that’s the interesting thing,” he says. “I’m so grateful to that company for the opportunity it gave me. I had to work with engineers and finance people – people who understood numbers – and for 11 years, we made original productions at Movistar. Do you think people who look at numbers all the time would have allowed that to happen if we weren’t making quality mainstream content?

“We weren’t making niche content simply to win awards. We won many awards, but the primary objective was to retain subscribers and attract new ones, so I believe you can make quality mainstream content. I don’t see any contradiction. HBO is a very good example.”

It’s helpful that Corral spent 15 years at Turner Broadcast System, which for many years sat next to HBO in the Time Warner stable. He left there for Movistar in 2014 having risen to General Manager and SVP of Turner Iberia, overseeing operations for CNN, TCM, Boing, Cartoon Network and TNT in Spain and Portugal.

Industry support

When Corral’s exit from Movistar Plus was announced last year, there was an outpouring of anger, grief and concern from Spain’s creative community that is rarely afforded to a commissioning executive.

An open letter signed by close to 200 members of the Spanish industry, including Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz, called out the Telefonica-owned Movistar, saying Corral and his team had championed a strategy “based on respect for creators, close collaboration with independent producers and listening to all the partners they have worked with, without ever neglecting their focus on entertainment.”

Movistar was so rattled that Corral’s effective replacement on the cinema side, Guillermo Farré, would later tell Deadline, “The goal is clear, the direction of what Domingo started works on many different levels.” Speaking privately to those in the Spanish production community, the jury is still out whether his legacy of hits such as Sîrat, La Peste, La Mesías and currently smash La Bola Negra is being honored.

Movistar – which has now dropped the confusing extra ‘+’ after the ‘Plus’ in its name – won’t comment officially on the exit of Corral and his team last year, but we understand that, internally, the position is the departures were part of a wider organizational restructure that impacted several managers, and that the company feels it maintains a strong position within Spain’s audiovisual community.

Corral himself remains in the dark about his departure. “The vision I believed in was successful – not just for me, but for my team, so I don’t understand why they made that decision,” he says. “They made management changes and other things, but you would have to ask them. I don’t know why I was fired. I didn’t ask.”

Corral is speaking to Deadline in Rome directly after appearing on a panel in which he whipped a partisan crowd up by passionately advocating for commissioners and gatekeepers to make ambitious moves or risk missing the next La Bola Negra.

“I strongly believe in what I said on stage,” says Corral, a veteran Spanish industry whose urgent and open conversational style is the antithesis of the measured and media-trained lines from many other executives.

“It’s very difficult for me to behave any other way, because when you create a project, you need to have a vision,” he says. “That vision isn’t interchangeable. I can’t execute a vision I don’t believe in, and it wasn’t only me. I had an amazing team working with me. I was leading the project, but I was surrounded by incredibly talented people. Almost all of them were fired as well.”

As for Movistar Plus+‘s output since he left, Corral stays diplomatic. “Honestly, I’ve moved on to something new,” he says. “I’m very excited about my new life, and I don’t look backwards. What I can say is that I wish them the best, because they’re very important to the Spanish audiovisual market.”

Plans for the future

Corral’s new life outside the corporate world. In San Sebastian last year when speaking for the first time after his Movistar exit, he quipped seeing ‘independent producer’ next to his name on stage felt weird “because I still don’t know if I’m an independent producer.”

Amusingly at MIA, Corral is handed a new name for his fledgling production operation, with a giant screen at the Westin Excelsior Hotel erroneously naming him head of ‘Good Day Productions’ (a Google search shows that is the company name of another Domingo Corral, a multi-disciplinary artist based in Oakland, California.)

Corral took the misnomer in good humor, chuckling as he repeated his line about unease about his newfound independent producer status.

Corral’s overriding belief is that quality, awards-chasing, festival-style fare can – and should – also be mainstream. “There are many things without quality that fail,” he says. “Why do we have to associate the word ‘quality’ with something that isn’t commercial? People want good food, good clothes, good television shows and good films. We should all assume that quality films and series can be mainstream.”

That puts into question the assumption quality productions are usually difficult to get made. “Difficult is a different story, yes,” says Corral. “But it’s possible.”