The Eternaut, which launched this week and broke into Netflix’s top 10, will get a second season. The streamer’s Latin American programming boss, Francisco ‘Paco’ Ramos, delved into what’s to come during an interview with Deadline. Producer Matías Mosteirin from K&S Productions, meanwhile, tells us that the plan is to wrap the story in that sophomore run.
“Season 2 is going to be very important,” Ramos says. “It’s going to dig into a lot of sci-fi concepts that were just pointed out in Season 1, and they are going to be fully blown.” Mosteirin picks up the thread: “We believe that we will manage to close the whole story in a beautiful way, with probably eight more episodes.”
Series creator and director Bruno Stagnaro will return for Season 2 of the show. It is a contemporary take on the iconic Argentine comic and graphic novel by Héctor G. Oesterheld, illustrated by Francisco Solano López and which was first published in 1957.
Set in Buenos Aires, The Eternaut follows events after a mysterious snowfall wipes out most of the population. Juan Salvo – played by Ricardo Darín – and his friends embark on a desperate struggle for survival. As such, it is firmly in the realm of grounded sci-fi.
“We wanted for people to actually feel that this could happen in their own city,” Ramos explains before digging into how the story builds. “Episode one has a tiny scale; it’s just in the house. Then in episode two, the scale opens to the building, and then in three, it becomes bigger again, the neighborhood, By the fourth episode, it is the whole city.”
Adapting the much-loved property into a series has resulted in what is reckoned to be the biggest ever TV production out of Argentina. “The country has a very strong reputation and history of making television and film, but I really feel this one is above and beyond anything that has ever been done here before,” Ramos said, speaking to Deadline from Buenos Aires.
“It’s not only the scope, but also the complexity and use of multiple technical and technological ways of making content that have never been used in one single show in Latin America before. Simultaneously, I would say it’s very personal. We have someone in complete control of his series in Bruno Stagnaro.”
Life Imitates Art
On the set of ‘The Eternaut’
Marcos Ludevid, Netflix
A team kitted out in protective outfits scanning a desolate Buenos Aires location sounds like a scene from the series. In fact, it was a moment when life imitated art. In 2020, a team of specialists got permission during the pandemic lockdown to measure up locations as part of production prep. They put on their Covid safety-wear and got to work. Given the usual congestion in the city that was a rare opportunity.
“We were like a mix of scientists and Martians as that first team of five people went out to the city to scan the main sets,” says Mosteirin.
The last snowfall in Buenos Aires was back in 2007 and bringing The Eternaut’s frosty aesthetic to the city is an endeavor stretching back years. K&S did a deal with author Oesterheld’s estate in the early 2000s. It was originally going to be a movie, but Netflix got involved in 2018 and it took a different form. “Getting back to episodic structure was the best scenario in terms of narrative and being loyal to the DNA of the original story,” says Mosteirin.
The VFX piece involved working with an array of international partners – DNEG in London, ReDefine in Barcelona, ScanLine in LA, Planet X in Holland and ILP in Stockholm. The producers had wanted to weave in the VFX work so that the director could pursue his take on the IP and his way of working.
“We didn’t want to work with a traditional visual effects pipeline,” Mosteirin explains. “Bruno is the kind of filmmaker who needs to remain creative on the set; that doesn’t mean that he needs to improvise, but he needs to see the scene and how it flows and work, so he doesn’t like to have boxes in terms of planning.”
The Legacy Of ‘The Eternaut’
Mosteirin has been making movies since the early 90s, and K&S has worked on films including The Revenant and The Road as well as making multiple projects for Netflix. But The Eternaut was different. “It was sensitive and critical for us, for the team and our company, and for Argentina,” he explains. “We really feel that responsibility in terms of how our industry and Argentina’s production capability is showcased internationally.”
The challenges of making the series included 2,000 shots with visual effects. Creatively, there was also pressure because the source material is held in such high regard at home.
“It is not the first time that we have made a big production, but this was the first big one based on Argentinian intellectual property,” says Mosteirin. “We couldn’t fail because it’s a property with a very strong fandom and it was a great treasure for us as artists.”
With The Eternaut, One Hundred Years Of Solitude out of Colombia and Senna out of Brazil, Netflix Lat Am has some very noisy projects on its slate, as previously reported by Deadline. Ramos’ first job is generating hits for Netflix customers, but he says the wider impact of the regional programming push will be felt industry wide.
“It has to be for everyone,” he says. “We took all these swings, and a lot of people thought, ‘They are losing their minds.’ Now they might feel emboldened and say, ‘We can make a big sweeping show out of Colombia, Argentina, Brazil or Mexico.’”
As people burn through Season 1 of The Eternaut, the question quickly becomes what happens next and when. The first season took eight months to shoot and had a year of post, so, with nothing officially scheduled for Season 2 yet, it won’t land soon. For Mosteirin, meanwhile, the challenge is not timing, it is retaining the atmospheric vibe the team created. Two runs and about 14 episodes in total is the plan.
“We can sustain it for a second season, but no more than that,” he says. “We feel that, artistically, that is the cycle to we need to sustain the mystique and the adventure of making the show. We want to challenge ourselves in the second season just as we challenged ourselves in the first one. We want to go for more, technically and creatively. We want to use all the knowledge we gained to do things on the second season that we didn’t manage to do on the first.”
