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How Netflix's Money Heist Became a Worldwide Phenomenon

By Gabriella Paiella

Photography by Fanny Latour-Lambert

Every worldwide phenomenon has to start somewhere, and in this case, that place was a hammock on a beach in Panama. There lay Álex Pina, trying to dream up his next project. It was 2016 and the Spanish producer had just wrapped Vis a Vis , a brutal drama about day-to-day life in a women’s prison. He wanted this new venture to be lighter in tone and needed it to be cheap to produce—something that he could film almost entirely in a studio but with a premise so explosive that it would make you forget you were stuck within the same four walls. As he lounged, his mind drifted toward the possibilities.

What about…a heist?

Okay, yes, a heist. Pina got together with his team and soon they were on a roll. This heist would take place inside the Royal Mint of Spain (which would conveniently satisfy the real-life in-studio requirements), where the perpetrators would take the employees hostage and print billions of euros for themselves. The show would have the flashbacks and the ballsiness of Reservoir Dogs, spiced up with the surreal black comedy of Spanish director Luis García Berlanga.​​ The characters? An outcast gang of career criminals brought together by a mysterious brainy figure known as The Professor. They were each assigned a code name corresponding to a major city: Tokyo, Rio, Berlin, Moscow, Nairobi, Helsinki, Oslo, and Denver (one of these things is not like the others), a random decision that would turn out to be inadvertently prescient. A wardrobe of crimson jumpsuits and Salvador Dalí masks would give the show a bold stamp of pop iconography.

The final product, La Casa de Papel , premiered on the Spanish station Antena 3 in 2017 and it did…pretty good! By season two the ratings cratered, and the production shut down. The cast and crew packed it in and returned to their lives and families.

But even before it first aired, Pina had slipped a flash drive with the pilot to Diego Ávalos, a V.P. at Netflix. The streaming giant had an ongoing licensing relationship with Antena 3 and Pina, which turned out to be fortuitous for both parties. “I watched it on the plane ride back to L.A. and knew there was something special,” Ávalos says.

The streaming platform asked Pina to recut it into more digestible chunks—from 15 long episodes to 22—and added subtitles and dubbing, a few small modifications that primed it for a much larger potential audience. For English-speaking markets, the show was renamed Money Heist, a title so hilariously simple that it circles back around to wild and brilliant. Otherwise, Ávalos tells me that they put exactly “zero marketing dollars” toward the first season.

It was an astute addition to the Netflix catalog. By 2018, Money Heist skyrocketed to become the most watched non-English-language program on the platform ( in early 2021, that distinction belonged to Lupin, a French series about a preposterously charming thief) and cracked the top five for most watched series overall. The ability to binge without commercial breaks turned out to be exactly what was missing. “Having to wait until the following week can seem fragmented,” Pina says. “This can make the viewer not really get into the series, or into a state of addiction.” Netflix has since released two more seasons to satisfy demand, and now fans are impatiently awaiting the fifth and final season, which will drop in two parts: five episodes in September and five in December. The close hold that Netflix keeps on its streaming numbers is tighter than the security at the Royal Mint of Spain, but it has revealed that 65 million households tuned into season four soon after its release. If you made an autonomous Republic of Money Heist Watchers, it would be the 23rd most populous country in the world, sandwiched between the United Kingdom and Tanzania.

The statistics are one thing, the massive cultural wave the show kicked off is another. Take the distinct outfits the characters wear as disguises, which director Jesús Colmenar pushed for. “George Lucas says, ‘Everyone knows what the Star Wars characters look like,’ ” he tells me. “I wanted that same thing.” It worked: The red jumpsuits and Dalí masks began cropping up everywhere, from protests against sexist and homophobic leaders in Puerto Rico to soccer games in Greece. Real-life criminals in Brazil, India, and France staged copycat robberies. Stephen King and Neymar raved about the show, and Bad Bunny referenced it on multiple tracks. The show’s anthem, “Bella Ciao”—a protest folk song written by laborers in 19th-century Italy and then adopted by antifascist partisans during World War II—became a revitalized hit, inspiring several covers, including an EDM remix by Steve Aoki. On TV, the fictional band of thieves end up winning the hearts of the public, a parallel that played out in real life too.

Instant fame struck each of the actors in a specific, bizarre way—made even stranger by the fact that this was for work that they had long moved past. Úrsula Corberó, who portrays Money Heist ’s feisty narrator, Tokyo, breaks into an electrifying grin when she remembers how the realization of her celebrity hit her. At the end of 2017, she was at a New Year’s Eve party in Uruguay with her boyfriend and his family. “Suddenly everybody started coming up to me and saying, ‘Tokyo, you’re a goddess, you’re incredible, I love you,’ ” Corberó tells me rapidly. Not quite understanding what was happening, she thought: What are the odds that all four people who watched the show happen to be at this party right now?

Miguel Herrán, the actor behind Rio, a boyish hacker and Tokyo’s love interest, says he watched his Instagram followers tick-tick-tick up from 50,000 to 1 million over the course of a 45-minute car ride. Esther Acebo, or Stockholm, so named because she’s a bank employee who’s held hostage before switching sides, was also overwhelmed by a flood of social media attention. “My phone started beeping like crazy, kind of like a slot machine where all the cherries line up,” she says. “Then it just turned off.” Pedro Alonso, who plays Berlin, the gang’s resident sociopath, says he was in Florence admiring the statue of David, “just studying this beautiful sculpture,” when he suddenly realized that everyone else in the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze was staring at him instead of Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

Pina recalls driving through Italy with the actors shortly after fans started losing their minds. “People were running after us like we were the Rolling Stones,” he tells me. “We thought: The world is upside down. What’s happening?”

But why Money Heist ? And why—no, how —did it keep us captivated when the temptation of constant entertainment is a mere smartphone tap away and we all have the attention spans of Petco goldfish? Well, for starters, the series grabs you within the first minute and hooks you up to a steady IV drip of high-octane action. The twists are constant and clever: Think Soderbergh, but with the melodrama cranked up to 11. For all the show’s fun, it also taps into the widespread anger and indignation bubbling in the aftermath of the worldwide financial crisis. “The series is meant to entertain, but an idea runs underneath. Skepticism toward governments, central banks, the system,” Pina told The Guardian last year. Another bit of universal appeal? The characters are lovable, well wrought, and, let’s be frank, genetically blessed. If there’s one thing humanity can agree on despite our differences, it’s that we enjoy watching supremely hot people fight and have sex.

After the first two installments hit big, Netflix came to Pina with a proposal to revive the show for a third season. So in late 2018, he got the gang back together, satisfying their implacable urge to heist by having them attempt to rob the Bank of Spain of its gold reserves. Long gone were the days of swinging in a hammock, trying to devise ways to keep costs down. The Netflix backing meant something crucial: money. Lots of it.

Javier Gómez Santander, the head writer, recalls the most immediate effects of this change. “I’ve always wondered, ‘How would it be to write with a big budget?’ ” he says. “And you realize what it is when you write on your script that it’s actually raining money and it happens. When you write on the script, ‘This takes place in Panama or in the Philippines,’ and nobody says no. It actually happens.”

Even though Money Heist concludes this winter, its unexpected global success will undoubtedly be studied for years by executives eager to bottle lightning again. It provides hard evidence that the rules of the entertainment game have shifted in real time. And Netflix, which has set up shop in over 190 countries and has a frighteningly powerful algorithm, is the undisputed juggernaut in this new landscape. The platform makes it possible to go to one place to watch a heady Weimar Republic epic from Germany ( Babylon Berlin ), a supernatural Egyptian horror series set in the 1960s ( Paranormal ), or a South Korean medieval zombie drama ( Kingdom ), all from the comfort of your couch.

Streaming puts a dent in American cultural hegemony by allowing viewers to get served stories directly from all over the world—though not always in their original or intended form. Foreign shows on the app default to the more awkward dubbed setting for first-time watchers, for instance, because of the data-driven (though perhaps imperfect) assumption that this will inspire more people to watch. Money Heist, in part, spurred Netflix to invest hugely in the quality and scope of their alternative-language options, expanding the idea of what a show’s target audience could be.

More than that, it helped expand the idea of what makes for a global story. If Netflix nabbed Money Heist ’s creators a gargantuan viewership, it didn’t alter the inherent DNA of what they were making. “We didn’t want to turn our backs on Spain. We’ve got this Latin passion,” Colmenar explains. “We don’t betray this essence at all in the third and fourth seasons. In fact, we actually have some very specific Spanish references—maybe even more than were included in the first and second seasons.”

Instead of sanding down cultural idiosyncrasies in the hopes of arriving at a big and bland common denominator, they’ve triumphed by employing some old-fashioned storytelling wisdom: The specific is universal. And Money Heist ’s success is a lesson that it’s always worth peering outside your bubble, even and perhaps especially if your bubble is a country that believes itself the center of the universe. Case in point: The show did not do as well in Anglophone areas as it did everywhere else, but it still surpassed Tiger King in viewers.

For Netflix, Money Heist didn’t change its strategy, per se, but it did affirm it. “It just solidifies the fact that great storytelling can come from anywhere,” Ávalos says. “It’s no longer Hollywood determining what stories can work around the world.”

The actors feel the shift too. “Here in Spain you actually hear, ‘Hey, I like the show even though it’s Spanish.’ That was the way we used to talk about it,” Acebo says. “I have the feeling that Money Heist has changed the way people regard Spanish fiction. It’s like suddenly a window has opened.” That includes room for criticism: Herrán, for example, thinks that his character could have been “much more” interesting. “I’m a hacker who, in four seasons, never touches a computer,” he says, smiling. “Also, the way I have to handle my relationship with Tokyo—there are things I personally would’ve done differently. But then again, maybe that’s why the show is a success, because the professionals are the ones handling it.”

The show has, however, reoriented the career arcs of its actors in meaningful ways. To make it internationally as a Spanish talent, you previously had to go through Hollywood or be Pedro Almodóvar. But take Corberó, who starred in the American action flick Snake Eyes this summer and has the highest crossover potential. “Imagine you are a Spanish actress. Before, if you had wanted to work in the United States, you would have had to go to the United States,” she says. “Now what has happened is, without leaving our homes, they are watching a series in the U.S. that is not even in English. It’s a Spanish series. This makes me really proud.”

A few days before the Money Heist finale was due to be shot, the entire script was scrapped and reworked. The writers had always worked up until the last minute, right as filming is happening, but this pressure was something else. After all, they had to try to nail the ending while a formidable percentage of the planet was watching, as if they were navigating a moon landing.

“We just didn’t sleep,” Gómez Santander tells me. “We’d be on the phone with each other early in the morning. We were obsessed. I told Álex I didn’t think I would ever get another night of decent sleep in my life until we finally wrote something we liked.” Corberó says, “I don’t know what came over me over the final two weeks, but I couldn’t stop crying. They even had to stop the shooting.” Herrán believes viewers will be pleased with the ending “but for one simple reason—most people like the things I don’t like, like series and things whose success is a mystery. So I’ll start to worry the day I think something is going really well.”

Even with the show wrapped and their futures once again wide open, Money Heist ’s stars are still processing how to be famous. Corberó and Herrán, the two biggest names, tell me that they’ve ended up spending much more time at their homes in Madrid to avoid attracting attention when they go out. Corberó says she sought out therapy to process the shift, saying that it’s “important to do things like that, to keep yourself grounded.” Herrán, meanwhile, has been exceedingly open about how fame has affected his mental health. “I always ask people things I find interesting on social media, like ‘Are you happy with the society in which we live?’ And people aren’t happy,” he says. “I don’t want people to believe that just because you’re famous, you’re happy. And that love, money, work, and life, everything is just fine and great because you’re popular. I’m still a human being like anyone else.”

Fans are clamoring for character spin-offs, and though Pina does not confirm anything in the works, he says that he thinks Tokyo, The Professor, Berlin, and Denver could all carry one. In any case, the Netflix perpetual motion machine keeps grinding along: It’s currently in the midst of producing a South Korean remake helmed by director Kim Hong-sun.

The creators are keeping the details of the final two-part season of Money Heist close to the chest, but they tell me it has been conceived of as a kind of war. As the grand breaking point between the beloved characters and the state, with all the attendant messiness and intensity and difficult decisions that come with that. It’s one last chance to flex a bit, to show just how big they’ve made it since the early days. “We built an entire set—this huge set that only lasted a minute and a half before we exploded it,” Ávalos eagerly shares. And it will, inevitably, include some heartbreak—as Colmenar puts it: “A victimless war is hard to find.” But regardless of the outcome, they’ve managed to convince the world to watch and care about a small local story—and isn’t that, in itself, a victory?

Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue with the title "​​Big Money."

Subscribe to GQ. Click here >>

PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Fanny Latour-Lambert Styled by Joana De La Fuente Grooming by Amparo Sánchez for Xartist Management For Acebo: hair and makeup by Raquel Álvarez for Xartist Management For Corberó: hair and makeup by Iván Gómez for Xartist Management Tailoring by María Isabel Madrid Produced by North Six Location: LeClab Madrid, Madrid, Spain

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Money Heist Lessons Learned: Unveiling Money Insights From the Series

Discover the valuable lessons learned from “Money Heist” or “La Casa De Papel,” one of the most gripping Spanish series that has captivated audiences worldwide.

Beneath its captivating plot lies a wealth of insights into finances, teamwork, and personal ethics. Here we take a look at the elements of “Money Heist” and highlight some practical lessons as it relates to finances.

No, I am not suggesting you resort to illegal activities to expedite your journey to financial independence . This is simply meant to be entertaining with a hint of reflection on how we think about some of the themes of money that we encounter in our lives.

Unraveling the Enigmatic ‘Money Heist’

The “money heist” series is an exhilarating journey led by the genius “money heist leader,” known as The Professor.

The suspense unfolds as a group of robbers, each named after a city, execute daring heists at the Royal Mint of Spain and the Bank of Spain. Let’s provide a “money heist short summary”.

The Genius and His Gang

At the center of the grand scheme stands The Professor, a mastermind who lays out two formidable heists.

His detailed plan is a testament to the power of precision and thorough planning. The robbers—Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin, Rio, Denver, Helsinki, Nairobi, among others—demonstrate the strength of diversity, unity, and individual skills.

Every character plays an indispensable role, proving that every single element is crucial when chasing a grand vision.

Financial Money Heist Lessons Learned:

Lesson 1: the mastery of planning.

Behind the breathtaking scenes, The Professor’s brilliance lies in his meticulous attention to detail. Every episode of the ‘Money Heist’ series is built around an incredibly detailed plan.

Just as The Professor leaves no stone unturned, success in personal finance also calls for well-thought-out planning. Clear financial goals are your guide to financial stability and prosperity.

Lesson 2: The Magic of Diversification

The robbers in ‘Money Heist’ are far from ordinary; they highlight the power of diversification. From Berlin’s leadership skills to Rio’s technical expertise, the team’s blend of unique abilities makes the impossible possible.

In the world of finance, diversification of your investment portfolio can be your safety net, protecting you from market volatility while potentially offering superior long-term returns.

Lesson 3: The Balancing Act of Risk and Reward

The ‘Money Heist’ crew is well-aware of the high stakes and potential rewards that await them. They risk their lives for a chance at a worry-free future.

This mirrors the world of personal finance where calculated risks can yield substantial returns. However, it’s essential to strike a balance between potential gains and potential risks.

Lesson 4: The Importance of Trust and Teamwork

Trust binds the ‘Money Heist’ crew together, especially during difficult times.

In financial dealings, trust is a cornerstone. It shapes relationships, whether with your financial advisor or business partner. Without trust, even the most comprehensive plans can fall apart.

Lesson 5: The Perils of Greed

Unchecked greed brings trouble in ‘Money Heist.’ From Tokyo’s impulsive decisions to Arturo’s reckless courage, the complications of greed are apparent.

In the financial realm, unchecked greed can lead to poor decisions and potentially significant losses. Striking a balance between ambition and caution is vital to avoid financial missteps.

Lesson 6: The Art of Adaptability

The ‘Money Heist’ crew often faces unexpected situations. Their strength lies in their ability to adapt and make quick decisions.

In personal finance, adaptability is a survival skill. Economic climates can change swiftly, and your ability to adjust your financial plans can make or break your financial success.

Your Financial Blueprint Inspired by ‘Money Heist’

“Money Heist” isn’t just about a high-stakes heist; it’s a reservoir of financial wisdom that can guide us in managing our personal finances.

By applying the lessons learned, we can better navigate our financial journeys. After all, aren’t we all executing our financial strategies, much like the money heist plot?

In the end, “Money Heist” is more than just a gripping Netflix series ; it’s a mirror reflecting the financial dynamics in our lives.

As we delve deeper into the captivating world of “Money Heist,” we not only satisfy our hunger for entertainment but also enrich our knowledge of financial management. These lessons provide a fresh perspective on the show, making us appreciate the “money heist series” even more.

And did you know there was a Korean Spin off of Money Heist? It brings even more entertainment and money lessons learned with a similar plot with a Korean twist.

Money Heist Korea: A Spin-Off Worth the Watch

Below is a quick summary of the captivating spin-off series, Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area. Prepare to be enthralled as we delve into the world of this Netflix original, which has been making waves since its release in 2022. In this article, we will unravel the intrigue that sets this Korean adaptation apart from its predecessor, providing you with a compelling case for why it’s a must-watch.

Streaming Service

Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area, much like its Spanish counterpart, is an exclusive Netflix original series available for streaming worldwide.

By harnessing the power of this leading streaming service, the spin-off offers audiences from all corners of the globe the opportunity to immerse themselves in its thrilling narrative and captivating performances.

Money Heist Korea Plot

This riveting Korean adaptation follows the footsteps of the original Spanish series, introducing viewers to “The Professor” (portrayed by the talented Yoo Ji-tae).

In this daring heist, set against the backdrop of a reunified Korean Peninsula, The Professor masterminds a plan to infiltrate and seize control of the unified Korea’s mint, effectively trapping hostages inside.

As the gripping storyline unfolds, we witness the brilliant strategists and resourceful desperados facing unexpected challenges, while the police race against time to stop them and uncover the true identity of the enigmatic mastermind.

The Money Heist Korea Cast

Yoo Ji-tae breathes life into the character of Park Sun-ho, the Korean equivalent of the original series’ Professor portrayed by Álvaro Morte. As the mastermind behind a 4 trillion won heist, Park Sun-ho’s complexities and calculated brilliance keep audiences on the edge of their seats.

Furthermore, his intricate relationship as the boyfriend of police inspector Seon Woo-jin adds an additional layer of depth and intrigue to the series.

Differences from the Original Series

While the Korean spin-off remains faithful to the essence of the original Money Heist series, it takes full advantage of its unique cultural and political context, delivering a fresh and engaging experience.

By situating the narrative within a unified Korean Peninsula, the spin-off explores themes and societal dynamics specific to the region, allowing viewers to witness the captivating blend of international intrigue and Korean sensibilities.

Look for More Money Heist Lessons Learned in the Spin-off Series

Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area seamlessly carries forward the exhilarating allure of its Spanish predecessor while infusing its own distinctive elements.

With its gripping plot, stellar performances, and the seamless integration of Korean culture and politics, this spin-off series is an absolute must-watch.

Prepare to embark on an unforgettable journey filled with suspense, action, and unexpected twists. Stay tuned as we continue to explore the captivating world of the “money heist cast Korea” in future articles!

Now you know why Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area stands out as a remarkable and riveting addition to the Money Heist universe.

Check out the show !

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Money Heist

An unusual group of robbers attempt to carry out the most perfect robbery in Spanish history - stealing 2.4 billion euros from the Royal Mint of Spain. An unusual group of robbers attempt to carry out the most perfect robbery in Spanish history - stealing 2.4 billion euros from the Royal Mint of Spain. An unusual group of robbers attempt to carry out the most perfect robbery in Spanish history - stealing 2.4 billion euros from the Royal Mint of Spain.

• Úrsula Corberó
• Álvaro Morte
• Itziar Ituño
• 3.7K User reviews
• 126 Critic reviews
• 38 wins & 45 nominations

Episodes 42

Photos 1251

• El Profesor

• Raquel Murillo

• Mónica Gaztambide

• Arturo Román

• Alicia Sierra

• Coronel Tamayo

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• Trivia The episodes were shot in order and the actors only received the scripts for each episode as they were shooting, so they also did not know what their character's fate would be. Álvaro Morte (The Professor) said the actors would message each other with excitement when they received a new script.
• Goofs When the Professor finds Tokyo, she is on the lam and wanted all over the country, but later she travels to the mint and other places without any concern that she'll be recognized.
• Connections Featured in Jeremy Vine: Episode #3.7 (2020)
• Soundtracks La casa de papel or "My Life Is Going on" Written by Manel Santisteban Performed by Cecilia Krull

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• Mar 14, 2023
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• Are there different subtitle versions for English? The one I'm watching is very poor. The English audio soundtrack is much more accurate. The trouble is the English soundtrack sounds so artificial, like all soundtracks.Despite not understanding a word Spanish I found the English/Swedish subtitles easier to comprehend if I paid attention to the way the actors spoke in Spanish. Using the dubbed English sound didn't work at all. A lot got lost in translation.
• What does "la casa de papel" really mean?
• May 2, 2017 (United States)
• Official Netflix
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Analysis: Money Heist #1 TV show in the world

April 9, 2020

Netflix’s global hit series  La Casa de Papel  (also known as  Money Heist)  rolled out its highly anticipated fourth season on April 3rd only to see it immediately soar to the number one most in-demand series in the world, according to global demand data insights company Parrot Analytics.

From April 3rd to 5th, La Casa de Papel  was 31.75 times more in demand than the average series globally, beating out such perennially popular series as  Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead,   Brooklyn Nine-Nine  and  Westworld. 

The Spanish series has also travelled well and has found success in a remarkable mix of global markets. In fact, from April 3rd to 5th it was more popular on a per capita basis in the Philippines, the USs, France and Italy than it was in Spain.

“This is a remarkable milestone for a Spanish production,” said Alejandro Rojas, Director of Applied Analytics at Parrot Analytics. “Since the series’ premiere in 2017 and for months before Netflix added it to its catalogue, Parrot Analytics tracked higher than usual demand not only in Spain, but in several international markets. It was clear then that series creator Álex Pina found a powerful way to connect with audiences across cultures and languages. After it became available on Netflix, its demand accelerated with each new season. Netflix has capitalised on this strong demand and leveraged its international platform to catapult the series into a truly global hit.”

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Money Heist

Where to watch.

Watch Money Heist with a subscription on Netflix.

Cast & Crew

Pedro Alonso

Úrsula Corberó

Álvaro Morte

El Profesor

Itziar Ituño

Enrique Arce

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Money Heist Season 1 Ending, Explained

If you love heist movies , then Netflix has a massive treat for you. ‘ Money Heist ’ is its Spanish-language original that follows an elaborate heist masterminded by a man called the Professor. Apart from enjoying massive popularity in Spain, the show has also become a favourite with the international audience, owing to the exposure provided by Netflix. The series is an adventurous ride packed with many edge-of-the-seat moments. If you haven’t yet seen it, head over to Netflix . Also, this article contains the discussion of just the first season, so you needn’t worry for the spoilers if you haven’t yet watched beyond it. SPOILERS AHEAD

Summary of the Plot

Why steal someone’s money when you can make it for yourself? Normally, this would mean that you should get a job. But in the world of ‘Money Heist’, it means breaking inside the mint and printing your own money. The show begins with a woman, who identifies herself as Tokyo, running from the cops. Just as she is about to walk into their trap, she crosses paths with the Professor who offers her another job. He has come up with a plan that would get them more money than anyone has even landed from a heist. He has also recruited a bunch of other people, all specialists in their fields. For five months, they work on perfecting the plan. But when it comes to actually execute it, it doesn’t take much time for things to go south, especially with the involvement of Inspector Raquel Murillo.

Who is the Professor?

Every good plan needs a mastermind. The grander the operation, the greater the genius of the person. In ‘Money Heist’, the man behind the scenes is a man who calls himself the Professor. He brings together a team of highly experienced criminals to pull off the biggest heist in history. While the audience is curious about the plan and whether or not it will succeed, they also want to know who is pulling everyone’s strings.

Since the whole team has had a run-in with the law in one form or another, every one of them risks identification. With their records already in the system, it becomes easier for the cops to know who they are and exactly what can be held against them. But, with the Professor, there is no such thing. His record is clean, which means he has a better chance of walking scot-free out of this mess. This begs another question. What would lead a man unstained by crime to suddenly plan the heist of the century? What are his motivations and how long has he been preparing for this?

So far, reading from his interactions with various characters, we can put together some bits and pieces. His real name is Sergio, with which Berlin addresses him in the final episode. His father was a robber, but he didn’t get to know about it until it was too late. He would tell him stories of heist movies . But the day Sergio found out about his father getting shot outside a bank, he discovered that they were not films but the stories of the robberies he had committed.

Sergio was very close to his father and this discovery about his profession led him to a revelation. His father’s last wish. He had talked to him about the biggest heist ever, the one that didn’t require stealing from anyone and the one where no one got hurt. This shows that Sergio’s father was a compassionate man and didn’t want to shed any blood to serves his purpose- a rule that Sergio tried to abide by as much as he could.

The Professor mentions that he had been sick and hospitalised for a good part of his life, and so, he read a lot. Considering his father’s influence, we can deduce that he read a lot about the things that would later become integral for him to plan the robbery. With the death of his father, he started making preparations to make his final wish come true. He decided to make it as big as he could, which meant that he would need a lot of time to plan everything to the smallest detail.

Now, we don’t get to know much about the Professor’s past life in this season, but it would be an intelligent guess if I said that he might have worked as a university professor! He had to put that heist in motion, but it would take time. He had to make living in the meantime. It would seem logical for him to plan smaller robberies in the meantime, to get some experience and make some connections. However, this would mean putting himself in the radar of law enforcement. The farther he stayed from this life, the easier it would be for him after it was done.

Now, the plan was always to not steal the money, but literally make it. The only place that can be done is the national mint. The target was pretty clear for him. Now he had to scout the place and start making plans. The proof that he has been at it for a “very” long time is given when he mentions that he had a tunnel built underneath the bank five years ago! This brings us to another speculation. For someone to have intimate knowledge as the Professor has of the bank and to have something constructed inside it means that the person has worked there. This is the only way he could have regular visits to the bank and get to know about every nook and corner. To also have a tunnel built under a specific room further attests to his familiarity with the place.

Because he had once been an employee there is also the reason why he doesn’t go inside the bank himself. Some of the staff must have been working there for a long time, long enough to have worked alongside him. This means a number of people might recognize him. This also gives more weight to his desire to not hurt the staff in any way. He must have gotten close to some of them while working there.

When Berlin tells him that he has had Monica killed, the reaction of the Professor shows much more than just the regret of not getting things done according to plan. Yes, he is not a cold-blooded killer, but he is also not the one who will hesitate to kill someone if that’s what it takes. It didn’t take much time for him to settle on killing Raquel’s mother. This means that the death of a stranger doesn’t disturb him as much as we think it would. But he knew Monica, they must have been friends, and this is why it hit him harder than it should have.

After a bumpy ride of sixty hours, the Professor and his team succeed in taking care of almost all the hurdles. Professor comes very close to killing Raquel’s mother but decides against it in the nick of time. To his good luck, the old lady forgets about it within seconds, which leads him to the realization that she has memory loss problem and has already forgotten about the call and its contents. With that taken care of, he becomes more relaxed.

Meanwhile, things seem to settle down at the bank as well. After the daring escape of some of the hostages, the team recovers not just from the loss of a good part of their leverage, but also from the loss of Oslo. In their attempt to escape, one of the hostages hits him with a pipe. Further, he loses a lot of blood which renders him brain-dead. Tokyo and Nairobi want to get him out so that he can get some treatment and might even be saved, while Berlin suggests sticking to the plan. After a heated moment, Helsinki interrupts and says that Oslo would rather die than be sent to jail.

Moving forward with the plan, they put into motion another scheme laid out by the Professor. To prevent another uprising, they decide to give two choices to the remaining hostages- get your freedom or become an accomplice and get one million dollars from the loot. They had expected people to go with the money, but they get mixed reactions. This is another win for them because now, they have separated wheat from the chaff. The ones who chose money now have a solid reason to assist the robbers and see this thing to the end. The people who chose their freedom are the ones who would most likely stir another attempt at an escape. So, they are sent to the basement.

It goes as planned until someone makes a mistake. Berlin has taken a liking to Ariadna, who had seduced him in the hopes of keeping herself alive. For a while, it seems like a dumb move because we know that the robbers have been told not to kill anyone. Until now. When she chooses her freedom, which is also motivated by the fact that she won’t have to see Berlin anymore, he advises her against it. He doesn’t say anything directly, but he does hint that it could get dangerous for her if she didn’t go for the money. Picking up on it, she goes for it, and when the other hostages are making their choice, she gestures Mercedes to do the same. As a result, the teacher stops a couple of other people from crossing the line to freedom.

But the most important thing is that Arturo picks up on what’s happening and decides to stay too. Now, the problem for the robbers is that they are ready to let their guard down. They are convinced that they have turned the hostages in their favour and need not worry about any attacks from them. But Arturo and Mercedes will not sit still. Helsinki should have killed Arturo when he had the chance!

While the foundation of one problem is set, the Professor bears witness to a huge blunder. In a moment of clarity, Raquel realises that the robbers would have set base somewhere to plan out the whole thing. Since all of them know how to use guns, they must have had some practice. Ángel had already pinpointed a pharmacy from where Berlin would get his medication, which makes their task easier to locate the position of the base camp. As Raquel discovers the whole plan in the attic, Professor panics in the car.

Money Heist Season 2: What to Expect?

With a cliff-hanger that will leave you short of breath, ‘ Money Heist ’ completely turns the table for the second season. In the first, the robbers had always been one step ahead of the cops. They had thought out every contingency and even in the face of the worst circumstances, they were ready with a solution. But now, the cops have the upper hand. Not only do they know the whole plan, but they’ll also have all of their DNAs, even the Professor’s, and the element of surprise is gone. They are on the same level, if not worse off.

The most important thing is when (because it’s not a matter of “if” now) will Raquel come to know about Sergio. Also, while the danger has hiked outside, the situation isn’t very well contained inside the bank, either. Arturo will definitely try to get back at them, most probably with Mercedes’ help and considering what a wicked person he is, the robbers should prepare themselves for a serious setback. Ariadna might also become a vital part of their plan.

The second season will also focus on the backstory of Professor and Berlin, who clearly know each other very well. Considering the moment that they shared in the final episode, they might as well be brothers. It has only been around 60 hours, which means not even three days! The plan is supposed to go on for ten more days; their escape route depends on it. With the cops one step ahead of them, what will happen now?

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• The Money Heist: Leadership And Management

The Money Heist: Leadership and Management

‘The Resistance’ – An Anarchist insight on Alex Pina’s Money Heist

This research paper endeavors to trace the anarcho-centric nature of Alex Pina's Money Heist by the application of Naom Chomsky's notion of ‘Anarchy’ with a prime focus on the intentions and actions of the protagonist and primary characters. Through a comprehensive analysis of the narrative, the paper will attempt to research the anarchic beliefs of the characters. It will also examine Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of ‘Carnivalesque’ while centering on his concept of the carnival, group structure, and laughter. It will attempt additionally to study the anarchist history of Spain, including the Catalonian rebellion of 1936; therefore, attempting to understand the origin of the anti-capitalist, carnivalesque, and anarchist ideology in Spain. In light of the work of Miguel Igualada, the study will attempt to link the effect of the 2008 Spanish housing crisis with the content creation in the country. It will draw parallels between the actions of the Professor and Spanish anarchist activist, Enrik Duran. Further, the paper will attempt to trace practices of State domination in the series concerning the role of the mass media with regard to Chomsky's ‘Manufacturing Consent’. Finally, the paper will attempt to explore the effect of power structures on groups while scrutinizing state practices like surveillance through the application of Michael Foucault's theory of ‘Power/Knowledge’.

Related Papers

Diana Palardy

Spain’s Generación X is better known for partying than protesting, restiveness than resistance, and popular prose than populist pamphlets. However, today’s youth, often dubbed the “Generación perdida,” project quite a different image of themselves. Growing frustration with systemic unemployment has eroded the apathy long associated with Spanish youth culture and sparked their indignation. This sentiment has been channeled into an anarchistic impulse to dismantle or overhaul the capitalist system and has led to a movement known as Movimiento 15-M for the massive protests that took place all across Spain on May 15, 2011. Various aspects of this movement are anticipated in the Gen X novels Historias del Kronen (1994) by José Ángel Mañas and Okupada (1997) by Care Santos, which offer different perspectives of anarchism in Spanish urban youth culture. The contrast between the treatments of anarchism in these novels provides a platform for fruitful discussion about the reconfiguration of the concept and practice of anarchism in contemporary Spain, the relationship between anarchism and individual autonomy, and the intersection of anarchism and utopia/dystopia in sociopolitical thought. Moreover, an analysis of the anarchistic appropriations of capitalist landscapes reflects the hierarchical relationships established in these novels.

Julián Casanova

This article focuses on the various examples of anarchist violence, from terrorist action in the 1890s to anonymous bombs of the first decade of the twentieth century; from the tyranny of the Star pistol in the 1920s to the uprisings and revolutionary terror of the Second Republic and the Civil War. What follows is a story that is contradictory, heroic, and menacing .

PEDRO GARCIA GUIRAO

Federico Ferretti

Widely entrenched in modern society, the carnival is a jolly moment of celebration. It is a mistake to assume, however, that the carnivalesque practice is a recent event. In fact, it dates back to medieval times, where profane and sacred traditions overlapped. Through his exploration of the work of French Renaissance Humanist Rabelais, Bakhtin (1968) has arguably been the main scholar to theorise the carnival as a moment of rebellion. Equally important for this essay, the Russian scholar refers to the medieval culture of humour as responsible for enabling a “temporary liberation from prevailing truth and from the established order” where “all were considered equal” (p. 10). On the other hand, if this was true for celebrations of folk culture, it was not the same for official state and ecclesiastic feasts, which would only reinforce existing social structures and values. Completed in a time marked by Stalinism, it is no surprise that the book was only published almost 20 years later. Until today, Bakhtin’s ideas have influenced anarchist groups worldwide (Dentith, 2005). Drawing on influences of youth culture, grassroots experiences and transgressive nonviolent actions, these groups took to the streets targeting symbols of undemocratic and authoritarian forces (e.g. state, corporations, financial institutions etc.). The anti-globalisation movement, as they became known, understood capitalism and neo-liberalism as “the roots of our social and ecological problems” (NFN, 2003, p. 184). In this essay, I want to explore how these groups have introduced a different approach to the activist practice - one which is neither violent nor passive. For the first section, I will briefly describe and analyse examples of protests – or protestival, as I will call them – making use of humour, satiric music and a queer aesthetic to confuse the violent state repression, to provide a glimpse of a desired fairer world and to embolden the movement against oppressive forces. In section two, I will apply two concepts to form a theoretical framework: the “Unruly Politics”, by Khanna et al. (2013), in connection with Bruner’s (2005) ideas of a “Healthy/Fun State” via-à-vis a “Sick/Humourless State”. Thereafter, I argue that, in times of a “cynical state”, the carnivalesque protest emerges as an innovative and more effective citizen action capable of defying social order and ultimately achieve a more just society.

Benjamin Fraser

James Michael Yeoman , Danny Evans

This article introduces the themes of a special edition of the IJIS on Spanish anarchism and transnational studies, presenting the case that the history of Spanish anarchism needs to be situated within a broader, international history of the left. This view helps to disrupt the image of anarchism as ‘exceptional’, without losing sight of its specific manifestation in Spain. It proceeds to outline the five articles that make up the remainder of the edition.

Ana Rodriguez Granell , Pau Alsina

This paper aims to analyze the factors related to affectivity, emotions and desire as key elements in the social production of subjectivity and the actual economic dynamics. Its aim is to explore the correspondence between the early critiques to modernity and the current New Economy model. To this end, it will focus on the political economy of creative industries in which the production of desires is understood to be an asset of productivity and it responds to the last capitalist reform. Special emphasis will be placed on how a critical community emerges and is able to question the contemporary labour conditions, not only to those who work in the vulnerable field of creative work but including a large range of unprotected workers. This analysis will take the form of multiple significant case studies, which will help to show how to suggest an alternative concept of emotion and desire, and how we can recover methods from past artistic avant-gardes and their engagement with social movements that had worked in this direction to create new communities and new political subjects in the contemporary economic context.

ANARCHIST EXPERIENCES AND THE INTERFACE WITH THE HUMAN PSYCHE (Atena Editora)

Atena Editora

Documentary, descriptive study with a qualitative approach, which aimed to carry out a documentary investigation in the national and international context on cultural and artistic production involving the themes of anarchism and the human psyche. The realization of this research made it possible to identify that anarchism is an antisocial activity, which involves the anarchist social movement. In this sense, it preserves in common analytical thought an ideology of demonic, tragic and terrorist characterization. However, it involves struggle, threat of death, fragility of the human being, which can compromise their psyche. The results of this study are expected to provide suggestions for future research, aimed at the relationship between political ideology, anarchism and the human psyche.

Gavin Grindon

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Series / Money Heist

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• No Killing : as part of what they want is to appear to be Just Like Robin Hood , they intend not to hurt anyone, because, if they kill even a single person, they will lose the battle of public opinion.
• No Names : Everyone (save for The Professor) is nicknamed after a city . This, supposedly, prevents attachments and avoids the potential problem of someone outing them.
• No Personal Relationships : this, technically, is supposed to prevent attachments and allow the group to go on their way without a problem once the robbery is done.

The day of the heist coincides with the visit of a group of students, among whom stands out Alison Parker, the daughter of the British Ambassador to Spain, and who is to play an (unwittingly) important role in the Professor's plan. The first phase of the plan goes swimmingly, but soon it becomes obvious that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and even the most obsessive Crazy-Prepared plans can be screwed up by human nature.

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The Professor makes a checkout call to the band. Berlin claims that things are running smoothly, but the Professor knows that they are not. Nairobi, another member of the band, had enough of him, attack him and take over leadership of the band.

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Can the Makers of ‘Money Heist’ Mint Another Hit With ‘Sky Rojo’?

Álex Pina is back with another glitzy, over-the-top Spanish thriller for Netflix. This time, he and his creative partner say, the story is even leaner and the excess is even more over-the-top.

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By Elisabeth Vincentelli

The new Spanish-language action series “Sky Rojo” is sheer excess.

The plot is simultaneously minimal and over the top: Three prostitutes are on the run, their vengeful pimp is after them.

“What do we want to be, hares or foxes?” one of the women asks her friends. “Foxes all the way” is the answer. And so goes the show itself. The action is nonstop, the ultra-vivid colors jump from the screen, the tonal shifts induce whiplash, and the soundtrack will fry your speakers.

The only thing that is restrained about “Sky Rojo,” the first season of which dropped Friday on Netflix, is its running time: Each of the eight episodes clocks in well under 30 minutes.

“ We have an audience that is becoming more and more demanding, so you have to give them the tenderloin — no sides, no French fries, no salad,” said the Madrid-based writer and producer Álex Pina, who created the show with his professional and personal partner, Esther Martínez Lobato. “They understand more with less so you must go to the essentials.”

Pina, 53, certainly knows about serving up meals people love to devour: He created “Money Heist,” which was Netflix’s most popular non-English-language series until the French heist drama “ Lupin ” passed it earlier this year. Martínez Lobato, 44, is a writer on the show, which is currently in production on its fifth and final season.

“Money Heist,” is just one of the creators’ high-profile series — a growing list that has extended their reach well beyond the Spanish border.

It has been a hectic pace: “We are so tired,” Martínez Lobato said dryly.

The couple met about 15 years ago, when Martinez Lobato joined the writing staff of “Los Hombres de Paco,” a cop show Pina had cocreated. Initially working with the Spanish giant Globomedia, they eventually set out on their own; Pina founded the production company Vancouver Media in 2016. In addition to writing, Martínez Lobato is an executive producer on most of the company’s productions.

“Alex wanted to create his own company and not be bound or stuck by any kind of network, so we created Vancouver Media with just him, myself and two other colleagues,” Martínez Lobato, 44, said in a video chat. (The couple were interviewed separately from their office in Madrid, each through an interpreter.)

Since its founding, Vancouver Media has cranked out the nutty melodrama “The Pier,” about two women connected by a mutual (dead) lover; the drugs-and-murder thriller “White Lines,” set on the party-happy island of Ibiza; and “Money Heist.” This output is all the more impressive given the tight creative control the couple maintains over each show, from conception to editing.

For “Sky Rojo” (which is set on another Spanish island, Tenerife), Pina and Martínez Lobato were keen to challenge themselves even further.

“We wanted to show a constant third act — all action, all the time,” Martínez Lobato said. “You take away any sequence or dialogue that is not absolutely necessary for the plot and you only use what’s extremely important and fast-paced. It is hectic and completely different from what we’re used to doing, but very stimulating.”

The central female trio is an international conglomerate of sorts made up of the Argentine singer-actress Lali Espósito; Yany Prado, from Cuba; and Verónica Sánchez, from Spain. Sánchez, who played one of the leads in “The Pier,” thought she was used to Vancouver’s fast and furious pace, but Pina gave her a heads-up when he offered the role of Coral.

“Alex came to me and said, ‘You will be a woman who is running away from a brothel where she has been held captive, and it’s action-packed so get in shape’ — he meant in terms of physicality and getting ready to fight,” Sánchez, 43, said through an interpreter. “When I received the script, I saw that the character was even crazier than I had thought.”

The self-possessed Coral, for example, starts off addicted to the powerful anesthetic propofol, which she gets through a client who is a veterinarian. No wonder Sanchez said she drank the highly caffeinated South American drink maté on the shoot every day — a fitting beverage for a show in which each episode feels like a shot of espresso.

Vancouver’s brassy approach may not be to everybody’s taste. But the distinctiveness of its productions, with their eclectic set lists, high-resolution cinematography and flamboyant plot twists, is undeniable. It all amounts to an aesthetic that the couple is happy to claim as Spanish.

“We’ve always had the same gaze from the United States in terms of fiction because they’ve been the main producers, but thanks to streaming platforms we can give a different perspective and a different spirit to any kind of genre,” Pina said. “What is local is perceived as exotic, in a good way, and people can appreciate it.”

With “Money Heist,” that appreciation reached a whole new scale — the show has become an international pop culture phenomenon. The fourth installment, which debuted in April 2020, reached Netflix’s overall Top 10 (which includes series and movies) in 51 countries. It reached the series Top 10 in 62. Halloween costumes have surfaced. The rapper Bad Bunny name-checked the character Nairobi (played by Alba Flores) in his song “Yo Perreo Sola .”

Some of the stars have become social-media royalty: Úrsula Corberó , who plays Tokyo, jumped from 600,000 Instagram followers in December 2017 to nearly 21 million now; Miguel Herrán , who plays Rio, jumped from 50,000 to 13.6 million.

This extra attention brought extra pressure to conclude the series in a satisfying manner. With restrictions over Covid-19 slowing down operations, Pina and Martínez Lobato were able to finally finish tweaking Season 5 of “Money Heist.” The thorny finale took 33 drafts.

“We are finally happy with the current version,” Pina said.

The delays also benefited “Sky Rojo,” whose two seasons were shot together. The show is a sensory overload that sometimes feels as if Quentin Tarantino were directing a long-form video for Versace: flashy, outrageous, punctuated by well-curated songs — another Vancouver signature. A highlight of “White Lines,” for example, was a mass orgy set to a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep”; in “Sky Rojo,” it’s a mordantly sarcastic use of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

At the same time, there was a real danger that all this glitziness could backfire given the new show’s premise, which, after all, is about women trying to escape sexual exploitation. The two creators were well aware that they were on treacherous ground but the delays proved providential.

“The tone is very tricky,” Pina said. “Having time helped us rewrite all the sequences — you can sound pretentious on the drama side, and you can go to the other extreme, which is trivializing a very important subject matter.”

For Sánchez, the show is a brilliant Trojan horse.

“You always find this kind of message in social cinema and documentaries that not everybody is willing to watch,” she said. “But a series from the creators of ‘Money Heist,’ everyone is going to watch it.”

An earlier version of this article, using incorrect information from Netflix, described incorrectly the popularity of the series "Money Heist." It was the streaming platform's most popular non-English-language series until earlier this year, when it was surpassed by "Lupin"; it is not the most popular non-English-language series to date.

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“The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!” Film Analysis Essay

How angry are you about the events depicted in the film? What is the film made you angry? Which person depicted in the film offended you the most?

The film made me actively angry about the events that it covered. The absolute focus on the short-term benefits by the perpetrators, their disregard of responsibility for what they have done, and their subsequent lack of punishment were perhaps the three elements that affected me the most. It would be pointless to blame just one person for the crisis, but I believe that the policies of George W. Bush allowed many of the people depicted in the film to gain enough power to make the housing market crash happen (Ferguson, 2011).

Who in your opinion is most to blame for the events depicted in the film? Democrats or Republicans? Government or financial services companies? Regulators who stuck by their free-market beliefs or investors who carelessly took on too much risk? What should have they done differently?

I believe that the Republican Party leader George W. Bush was one of the initial people responsible for these events. However, the blame should lie on the shoulders of all that were heavily involved because each of them performed crucial parts of the plan. The free-market beliefs of the regulators not only allowed these events to transpire but even enabled them through the idea that the end profit justifies the means as long as it is technically legal.

Do you think someone should go to jail for the behavior depicted in the film? Who? Remember they discussed evidence that senior bankers on Wall Street used prostitutes and illegal drugs, sometimes paying with company credit cards. of bringing a criminal fraud case related to subprime loans and CDO’s would be too difficult, should prosecutors go after this other behavior?

The history of the war on organized crime shows that when criminals cover their tracks, other avenues of their illegal activities should be exploited to arrest and subsequently jail them. Al Capone’s tax fraud allowed the authorities to jail a man who was responsible for thousands of other crimes (Waata, Smith, & Dana, 2014). Corruption may be a very difficult thing to fight in court, but illegal drug use and prostitution are relatively common crimes that may bring real jail time to those who were able to evade punishment for the crisis. Senior bankers should be the primary targets of these arrests.

Do you think educational institutions should have a policy regarding conflicts of interest? What did you think about the professors from Columbia and Harvard?

Conflicts of interest can be extremely damaging to systems in which they arise. They show that it does not perform according to its function. However, policies against them should be worded in very specific ways because in some cases, conflicts of interest arguments can be used to suppress important information from getting out to the public.

ln, our readings so far many authors argue that income inequality by race, ethnicity, and gender is always related to labor market inequality in the process. Discuss if and how these explanations are mentioned In the film?

The inequality in the labor market is clearly shown in the film through the difference in how the people responsible for the crisis were treated in court. While the corrupt nature of their actions was clear, nobody received any harsh punishments (IsuruFoundation, 2012). At the same time, people who were the primary victims of these events often receive much harsher punishments for much lesser reasons.

Explain the difference between wealth and income and why both are important in understanding racial inequality. What has been the historical impact of land ownership after slavery, and residential segregation? Why and how did the wealth gap between whites and other groups change between 2005 and 2009? Explain. Do you find a link between the historical impact and current disparities? Explain.

Wealth represents the capital of the person. It includes such assets as houses, stocks, savings, and financial holdings. On the other hand, income is the money that a person or household receives for working. Inequality stems from the inability of the majority of racial minorities and poor people to amass wealth in the current economic system due to discrimination and the widening wealth gap between the upper and lower classes. African Americans are especially affected by this due to the post-slavery period of segregation preventing them from creating businesses and amassing wealth during the times when it was more feasible. The housing market crisis exacerbated the issue from 2005 to 2009 because it was seen as a chance for people of color to start getting wealth but resulted in the opposite (Hall, Crowder, & Spring, 2015; Stockhammer, 2015; Raymond, 2017). The historical impact has a clear effect on current events because the majority of people who have wealth and power either gained it during the times of heavy discrimination or their families amassed it even earlier.

Why does the idea of meritocracy and that “if you work hard, you will get ahead” continue to be part of the American dream and the national discourse even after evidence to the contrary? Is it all up to the individual? Explain

I believe that these ideas persist despite the evidence against them is due to a multitude of factors. The first is the presence of outliers who occasionally appear in the market through innovative ideas coupled with effective business plans and general luck. The second is that these ideas are beneficial to the ruling class as it justifies their success and lets them see poor people as “underachievers.” The last reason is that these ideas are at the core of the United States and at one point they might have reflected reality.

Works Cited

Ferguson, C. (2011). Inside job . Sony Pictures Home Ent. The UK.

Hall, M., Crowder, K., & Spring, A. (2015). Variations in housing foreclosures by race and place, 2005–2012. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , 660 (1), 217–237.

IsuruFoundation. (2012). The biggest bank heist ever! | HD . Web.

Raymond, E. L. (2017). Race, uneven recovery and persistent negative equity in the southeastern United States. Journal of Urban Affairs , 0 (0), 1–14.

Stockhammer, E. (2015). Rising inequality as a cause of the present crisis. Cambridge Journal of Economics , 39 (3), 935–958.

Waata, H., Smith, R., & Dana, L. P. (2014). Prohibition and the American Dream: An analysis of the entrepreneurial life and times of Al Capone. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business , 21 (1), 1.

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IvyPanda. (2021, May 6). "The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!" Film Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biggest-bank-heist-ever-film-analysis/

""The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!" Film Analysis." IvyPanda , 6 May 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/the-biggest-bank-heist-ever-film-analysis/.

IvyPanda . (2021) '"The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!" Film Analysis'. 6 May.

IvyPanda . 2021. ""The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!" Film Analysis." May 6, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biggest-bank-heist-ever-film-analysis/.

1. IvyPanda . ""The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!" Film Analysis." May 6, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biggest-bank-heist-ever-film-analysis/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""The Biggest Bank Heist Ever!" Film Analysis." May 6, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biggest-bank-heist-ever-film-analysis/.

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Money Heist- Ethical Subjectivism

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Money Heist is an original Netflix crime series that was first aired in 2017. In the film, a very knowledgeable man, some prefer the term genius, Sergio Marquina, recruits a group of eight people, all experts in different fields, to carry out a heist in the Royal Mint of Spain. They plan to enter the Mint in disguise and take hostage of the people present in the building and make their own money for eleven days while taking care of the hostages (Mandal, 2). They then plan to finally escape free while maneuvering through the police efforts to track them down. The members of the heist all take up corded city names to mask their personal information. Tokyo is a runaway robber who narrates the story, Raquel Murillo, who is initially a part of the police department until she becomes part of the heist in season 3, Berlin, a jewel thief, Denver and his father Moscow who are miners, and Nairobi, a prowess in counterfeit and forgery (Mandal, 2). According to the professor, the heist is for a noble cause, that is, the less privileged in the society fighting back for their denied and misused rights. The film’s dilemma, therefore, lies in whether the professor’s claim and way of expressing them are right, and by what grounds we use to judge these motives. The paper tries to explain these questions through the theory of ethical subjectivism.

Ethical subjectivism states that ethical propositions hold moral truths, and the truth or falsity of these truths are only determined by individual attitudes (Richard, 20). This is also in line with moral relativism which implies that moral propositions can be adjusted depending on the situation at hand. In this case, the professor and his crew rob the Bank of Spain to unmask the evil ingrained in today’s society. In season two the professor explains to Raquel Murillo, the inspector who is after the perpetrators of the heist, that when politicians and other high profile figures steal from the people it is not considered theft (Garcia, 370). However, when individuals like him do the same thing, it becomes a national concern. According to the moral subjectivism theory, the professor’s view is justified when we consider the grounds with which he organizes this heist; resistance.

The coordinators of the heist make sure to not compromise any of the hostages’ lives, which builds on the ethical grounds on which the heist is done. To highlight their aim of the heist as resistance, the professor makes it clear that they are not to harm any of the hostages, which would tarnish their name as murderers. For a gang of members who are willing to implement the biggest heist in the history of Spain, they sure are patient with the hostages . Here and there some of the hostages try to make their escape but there is no use of excessive force and torture . Arturo, one of the hostages tries to fight back, and amid the tussle, he gets shot by the police’s snippers (Mandal,10). The coordinators of the heist make sure that he fully recovers from the bullet. They make urgent demands to the police, to allow in a medical team. This shows that the main aim of the heist was to show opposition towards the corrupt forms of government that are in place. They are not robbers. They could have easily executed characters such as Arturo who almost cost them the heist. They even lose some of their team members, but no hostages are lost. They are human enough to provide the hostages food, water and even take care of the old hostages and one pregnant woman who is also a part of the hostages.

In the same line of thought, the professor, Sergio Marquina, makes it clear to them that they are not murderers but only a group of people who want to take back what was taken from them. He was raised as an ailing child in the hospital, and spent his time, reading a lot of books, precisely his wide knowledge. Sergio’s father was forced to rob a bank to pay for his son’s treatment but then ended up being killed in the heist. In the first season of the series, Sergio explains how his father was denied all means to save his son by the people who had the chance to. He was therefore pushed to the wall, to plan a robbery without putting anyone else in the hospital. The heist is, therefore, Sergio’s will to avenge his father’s death and to also take back the pain that the lesser people in the community felt as trailed through impoverishment with the corrupt systems of government in place.

Society might however see this through the eyes of moral absolutism, that an action is either wrong or right regardless of the circumstances that lead to it (Leone et.al, 21). Other skeptics may argue that the professor did a morally right thing but in the wrong way. However, if we look keenly into the structure of the current leadership, there is no way in which the lower class can speak against the evil of their political systems. These people have money and power, and will always find ways to escape their wrongdoings. Even the court systems that are supposed to be grant fairness and justice for the less fortunate, are now easily corrupted by the more powerful. There is no way out for these kinds of people, and this precisely why the professor decides to take the bull by the horns by strategically and meticulously organizing the heist. The reaction of the people of Spain is also one indicator that the heist was necessary. They are in support of the heist. They relate to its motives. We even see police inspector Raquel Murillo, who was once on the side of the government, becoming a part of the heist.

The drama series showcases a different face of crime. Crime with totally different motives. It completely changes viewers’ definition of what is right or wrong, and by what extend can one cross into the other. It would be hard and illogical to ignore all these views that the series tries to put forward, by deeming it as entirely wrong because of how we have been taught to explicitly see theft as wrong. It shows the extreme measures we are supposed to go to get our demands heard.

Double, Richard. Metaethical subjectivism. Routledge, 2017.

García-Mainar, Luis M. “Reality matters: Transnational realist crime film and television in Spain.” Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 16.3 (2019): 363-381.

Leone, Luigi, Mauro Giacomantonio, and Marco Lauriola. “Moral foundations, worldviews, moral absolutism and belief in conspiracy theories.” International Journal of Psychology 54.2 (2019): 197-204.

Mandal’s, Shri Vile Parle Kelvani. ‘The Resistance’–An Anarchist insight on Alex Pina’s Money Heist. Diss. Government of India Best College 2016-17, University of Mumbai, 2016.

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'It wasn't done stylishly': Giuliani gripes about being served AZ papers on his birthday

David Edwards

Senior editor, david edwards has spent over a decade reporting on social justice, human rights and politics for raw story. he also writes crooks and liars. he has a background in enterprise resource planning and previously managed the network infrastructure for the north carolina department of correction..

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's former attorney, complained over the weekend after he said Arizona served him with an indictment notice that was not "done stylishly."

During a Sunday live stream, Giuliani's co-host and girlfriend Maria Ryan recounted how the former New York mayor was served with papers from an Arizona indictment at his 80th birthday party Friday. Giuliani and 17 others are facing charges for an alleged fake elector scheme connected to the 2020 presidential election.

The New York Post described the scene as "chaos."

"Mayor Giuliani, I have to tell you, never runs from anything," Ryan insisted. "This man is an American hero. Look it, he was never even informed he was indicted. He kind of heard about it from friends."

ALSO READ: 8 ways Trump doesn't become president

"I've been tweeting them for a while," Giuliani said. "And I said, if there's any indication of how you operate since you can't find me and I have announced my location 10 days in a row, you must really screw up vote counting."

"And then I, I didn't know how to get the damn thing because I didn't know when I had to appear," he continued. "So one guy, he walked in between a couple of people who didn't know who he was. And he handed me a folded up, crumpling piece of paper."

"It was a crumpling piece of paper. It wasn't like done stylishly. And he handed it to me, and he said, this is from Arizona. Attorney General, you know."

Giuliani griped that the document he was served was not the entire indictment.

"I still don't have the indictment," he said. "Well, maybe it'll be like Trump . They won't tell him what he's charged with."

"You make an indictment to harass an American hero, and you don't even give them the indictment," Ryan agreed. "He gets convicted, God forbid, if that happens, they'll tell him what the crime was."

Watch the video below from Rudy Giuliani.

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Should trump be allowed to run for office, 'hard to believe': chuckling arizona ag fact-checks rudy giuliani's court summons claim.

Rudy Giuliani was the subject a swift and comical fact check Monday from the Arizona attorney general who successfully subpoenaed him to appear in court .

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes detailed the many ways her office attempted to serve Rudy Giuliani before issuing the court summons at the former New York City mayor's 80th birthday in Florida.

"We had the attempted on multiple occasions in multiple ways to serve Mr. Giuliani our agents had traveled to New York City to try to serve him," Mayes said. "We were not allowed in his building there where he lives. We stayed there for two days."

Mayes told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins that her team eventually replied upon Giuliani's social media to locate Trump's onetime lawyer and confidante.

ALSO READ: Delay, delay: Lauren Boebert keeping personal finances secret until after GOP primary

"We found out essentially through his through his live streams," Mayes said. "He's not that hard to find."

Giuliani and other Trump allies have been charged in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results on behalf of the former president, who has been charged himself in Georgia and Washington, D.C.

Collins asked Mayes to verify a statement made by Giuliani had reached out to her agents "like a gentleman" and told them where he could be found.

"Is that true?" Collins asked. "Or was it that you just knew because it was widely publicized that he was having a birthday party in Palm Beach?"

Faced with this question, Mayes started laughing.

"Yeah, I can tell you he did not tell us where he was gonna be except that he told the world where he was," Mayes said. "It was really hard to believe he didn't know that we were looking for him given the number of times and the different ways we had tried."

Watch the video below or click here .

'Trump is the real cancel culture — emphasis on cult': Jon Stewart slams MAGA woke whining

The Daily Show Host Jon Stewart Monday skewered far-right media pundits over what he described as a hypocritical condemnation of victimhood culture in which they paint themselves as the biggest victims.

Stewart lashed out at Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham for their repeated and public rants against "woke cancel culture" he argued had nothing on them.

"This is their identity now," Stewart said. "They say what they want if you get upset about it, you don't believe in freedom."

Stewart's live audience broke out into spontaneous laughter when faced with a clip of Hannity declaring that he was not the type of person to become easily upset.

"Sean Hannity can say with a square head, 'I'm not the kind of guy who gets outraged?" Stewart demanded. "He's basically just a meat bag support system for a forehead vein."

The Daily Show then aired clips of Hannity promoting blood-boiling stories about 'disgusting' snowflakes whom he railed against.

"But every snowflake is different," a coy Stewart replied.

ALSO READ: Judge rejects Fox News-inspired Georgia man who rained hate on school administrator

Ultimately, Stewart argued the far-right's free speech complaints don't hold up to a modern age in which any and all internet users are encouraged to share their opinions.

"We are not censored or silenced, we are inundated," said Stewart. "And it is all weaponized by outrage hunters."

The segment then turned to Trump , specifically the speech in which he confused former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

Stewart showed viewers a clip Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) downplaying Trump's fundamental mistake .

In a robotic voice, Stewart claimed, "He is reversed aging, he is stronger, he is Benjamin Button, he will be our wisest baby president!"

Stewart argued Republicans such as Stefanik who lean over backwards to avoid criticizing the former president are the true perpetrators of a worrisome cancel culture.

"Denying reality still won't save you," Stewart said. "There's no level of loyalty deep enough to be free of Trump cancel culture...emphasis on cult."

'Remarkable': Experts stunned by judge's slap-down revealed in Trump trial transcript

The newly released transcript in former President Donald Trump's criminal hush money trial reveals a dramatic moment that stunned legal experts who examined the document Monday night.

A CNN panel that included former federal attorney Elie Honig and Obama Administration "Ethics Czar" Norm Eisen unpacked the "extraordinary moment" when Merchan lectured attorney and Trump defense witness Robert Costello on courtroom decorum.

"The bigger drama happened after the jury was gone," Honig said. "What an embarrassment."

The panel looked specifically at the moment when Costello asked Justice Juan Merchan and received a swift and brutal reply.

“Can I say something, please?” Costello demanded.

“No," snapped Merchan. "This is not a conversation."

Said anchor Kaitlan Collins, "the most remarkable part" is that "the jury missed all of this."

Honig argued that while Merchan may initially appeared to have countered Trump's legal team, in truth the Manhattan criminal court judge had done them a service.

"The judge did the defense a bit of a favor," Honig said. "He get got the jury out of there real quick."

But Honig also wondered what exactly Trump's lawyers thought they had to gain by introducing the problematic witness, brought in purportedly to discredit former fixer and star witness Michael Cohen, in the first place.

"What did the defense even get from the guy," Honig asked. "They're just letting him act like a maniac and it's hurting the defense."

Eisen said he'd seldom seen a witness act out the Costello had

"They were rolling their eyes, they were pursing their lips, they were shaking their heads," Eisen said. "The irony [was]...will Michael Cohen kept his cool for an entire week. Bob Costello, a long-respected attorney blew up the entire courtroom."

'A fantasy of manhood': Are frat boys the new Proud Boys?

Inside donald trump’s billion-dollar big oil heist, the last time oligarchs tried to take over america it led to civil war.

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