“Vengeance” (“Venganza”), pitched as the biggest-budgeted Mexican action movie ever produced and the first Mexican original from Amazon MGM Studios granted an exclusive theatrical window before streaming, has rolled off Prime Video as a bona fide global hit, taking the platform’s No. 1 spot in territories as far-flung as Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines and Italy.
For producer Pablo Cruz , the El Estudio chief who shepherded the film over six years, that vindicates an argument Mexican producers have been making for a decade: Locally-rooted genre, made at scale, travels.
It also, he tells Variety , exposes how little visibility producers have over their performance data on the platforms now bankrolling the much of high-end Latin American film.
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“Sadly there is no day-to-day intel that we can all use to better serve the audience, so we live in darkness,” says Cruz, who runs El Estudio after stepping back from operations at Canana, the indie banner he co-founded with Diego Luna and Gael…