Álex de la Iglesia: “30 coins are not renewed”

The series 30 Coins was commissioned as an original series by HBO Spain, which tried to attract the attention of its potential audience with the name of its creator: Álex de la Iglesia, known for his work as director of The Community or The Day of the Beast . It later became an HBO Max production when the platform’s name was changed. And, now that the streaming service is changing its naming again, it no longer has a place in the catalog: there will be no third season for Max, as the platform is now called.

The news came from the creator: “30 coins are not renewed.” It is a controversial decision due to the high profile of the production and the fact that Álex de la Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarria, with whom he has written all the episodes produced to date, had plans to close the story with a third season, whose installments They have already been written.

“The story was conceived from the beginning as a trilogy,” the author shared on social networks, where he confessed that he does not plan to give up and that he intends to find a way to finish the story: “30 coins is part of my life. “I’m going to do everything possible to finish it.”

With the first season, released in November 2020, the project surprised both its way of approaching horror and its tone: it drew on Catholic tradition to offer a horror comedy with a traditional and unmistakably Iberian tone. The protagonist was Father Manuel Vergara (Eduard Fernández), an exorcist and former boxer, who lived isolated in a town in Segovia to forget his past.

There, however, inexplicable phenomena began to happen in which Elena (Megan Montaner), the town’s veterinarian, and Paco (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), the town’s dim-witted mayor, found themselves involuntarily involved. The viewer soon understood that everything had to do with the thirty coins with which Judas was paid for his betrayal of Jesus Christ, a source of paranormal misfortunes and also an object of worship by satanic forces.

With a cast that included Cosimo Fusco, Núria González, Macarena Gómez, Pepón Nieto, Manuel Tafallé and Manolo Solo during the first season, both Najwa Nimri and the American actor Paul Giamatti joined the second season, embracing the international ambition of the production .

With Max’s decision not to produce the third and final season of 30 coins, two hypotheses can be considered. The first is that the second season of eight episodes, broadcast between October and December 2023, did not have the expected performance among subscribers. The other is that, after the moves made by Warner Bros Discovery in the United States, with the sole objective of cutting costs, the philosophy of saving has been transferred to Spain.