L to R: Carlos Santos as Rafa, Joaquín Furriel as Guillermo, Pau Simon as Max in the first episode, titled “Atomic Monkeys.”
NETFLIX/Emilio Pereda
Billionaires’ Bunker (El refugio atómico), a tale of wealthy elites hunkering down in a secret luxury bunker amid the rising threat of a nuclear war, sharing the underground safe haven with people they despise, shot to the number one on Netflix’s Global Top 10 non-English shows.
The eight-episode thriller captured 10.3 million views in its second week. It got a major bump from its debut week, when it attracted 3.7 million views. Audiences tuned in to see how a group of 45 families navigate survival in the Kimera Underground Park. Set 1,000 feet below a lake, the fallout shelter becomes a pressure cooker for personal dramas and long-simmering conflicts.
The series taps into a compelling premise: what happens when the ultra-rich secure protection from world-ending catastrophe that others can’t access, only to discover they’re trapped in a golden cage with its own horrors.
Creators Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato, the masterminds behind global phenomenon Money Heist (La Casa de Papel), have crafted another Spanish hit examining how extreme wealth warps human behavior. Their latest explores privilege and moral compromise when civilization collapses.
Creators Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato have crafted another Spanish-language hit that examines how extreme wealth corrupts the human psyche amid an unthinkable end-of-the-world scenario, exploring privilege, survival, and the moral compromises wealth enables when civilization collapses.
For the protagonists, what begins as a temporary safety measure becomes a nightmare when Spain’s wealthiest elites watch helplessly as nuclear bombs detonate and the surface world burns while they remain trapped together underground.
The cast includes Pau Simon (Nudes) as Max, Miren Ibarguren (Phenomena) as Minerva, Alícia Falcó (In the Company of Women) as Asia, Joaquín Furriel (The Kingdom) as Guillermo, Carlos Santos (1992) as Rafa, Natalia Verbeke (Ana Tramel: The Game) as Frida, and Montse Guallar (If I Hadn’t Met You) as Victoria.
The success extends Netflix’s winning streak with Spanish original productions. Money Heist became the streamer’s first most-watched non-English series, paving the way for massive regional investment.
Earlier this year, Netflix announced it would invest more than one billion euros in Spain, building on a decade-long presence that has produced more than 1,000 Spanish titles since 2017. Spanish content alone generated over five billion viewing hours on the platform last year.