The 100-million-viewer trilogy nobody wanted to buy
Nobody wanted Culpables at the start. Pokeepsie chief executive Carolina Bang spent three years trying to sell the Spanish romance before Prime Video backed it. That trilogy has since been watched by more than 100 million viewers, according to Prime Video.
The three films — Culpa Mia, Culpa Tuya and Culpa Nuestra — are produced by Pokeepsie, a Spanish production company owned by Banijay Entertainment, Prime Video greenlit the project, as reported by Deadline. They adapt the books by Mercedes Ron and star Nicole Wallace and Gabriel Guevara. The first film, Culpa Mía (My Fault), was announced by Prime Video as a Pokeepsie Films production to premiere exclusively on the streamer in 2023, according to Prime Video.
Culpa Mía is based on the first book in Ron’s Culpables trilogy, while Culpa Tuya follows the second book. Ron’s series is a New York Times bestselling series, Prime Video said when announcing the second film, according to Prime Video. Bang was speaking alongside Banijay Entertainment executive Steve Matthews at the IberSeries industry event in Madrid, organised for Spanish-language film and television.
Bang said “nobody wanted it at the very beginning.” Pitching young adult stories, meaning dramas aimed at teenagers and viewers in their early twenties, was impossible five years ago, she said. Now everybody is doing young adult.
It is a sharp turnaround. Pokeepsie’s follow-up for Prime Video, Drawn Together (Enfrentados), went straight to the top of the streamer’s chart on release. Ron has also published a fourth instalment in the Culpables book series earlier this year.
Matthews, who is Head of Scripted, Creative at Banijay Entertainment, also addressed the group’s merger with rival All3Media. He said he had no concerns that the deal will harm creativity. Nothing changes, he said.
There is still integration work to do. Matthews said there is a lot of work to do in the United Kingdom after the merger, given the number of labels based there. Labels is the trade term for the individual production companies owned by a larger group.
What makes this stand out is the distance travelled. A three-year struggle to sell one teen romance has become a three-film franchise with a global audience above 100 million, plus a chart-topping follow-up. For viewers, this means more Spanish young adult stories are likely to find a slot.
