Netflix's Spanish-language film "La Bola Negra" won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, a prize that has sent nearly every winner since 2012 to an Oscar best-picture nomination.
The film, a queer epic about the intertwined lives of three gay men, was directed by the Spanish duo known as Los Javis, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. TIFF festivalgoers, who vote on the People's Choice Award directly, chose it over a field that included Peter Farrelly's comedy "I Play Rocky," about the making of "Rocky," which finished as first runner-up, and Siân Heder's "Being Heumann," a film about disability rights pioneer Judy Heumann, which came in second.
The award carries real weight in Hollywood's awards calendar. Since 2012, every People's Choice winner but one has gone on to earn a best-picture nomination at the Academy Awards. The sole miss came in 2024, when Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation "The Life of Chuck" took the TIFF prize but failed to land an Oscar nod. Last year's winner, "Hamnet," collected eight Oscar nominations.
Netflix acquired "La Bola Negra" out of the Cannes Film Festival, where it split the best director award with Paweł Pawlikowski's "Fatherland." The streamer has launched a full awards campaign behind the film and plans what has been described as its longest theatrical release yet. "La Bola Negra" opens in theaters October 16 before moving to Netflix's streaming platform on December 2.
That gap between theatrical and streaming dates matters. Oscar voters have long been skeptical of films that skip or abbreviate their theatrical runs. Netflix appears to be signaling it takes the best-picture race seriously this cycle.
Los Javis issued a statement after the win:
"This is a deeply personal film but it also carries a message of the importance and necessity of expressing who you are. Knowing that audiences connected with it and made it their own is the greatest gift we could receive."
The festival's 51st edition, which closed Sunday, handed out People's Choice Awards in three additional categories. "Elsinore," starring Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who performed "Hamlet" in London while suffering from AIDS, won the international film prize. Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" was first runner-up in that category, and Hur Jin-ho's Korean procedural "The Assassin(s)" finished second.
In the documentary category, "Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been," about the 85-year-old vocalist, took the audience award. And Matthew Rankin's gonzo documentary "Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney," about the former Canadian prime minister, won the Midnight Madness audience prize.
TIFF's track record as an Oscar predictor rests on a simple pattern: large, paying audiences, not critics' juries or industry insiders, pick the winner. That populist filter has proven more reliable than most festival prizes at forecasting Academy voters' tastes. The 2024 exception with "The Life of Chuck" is worth noting, but one miss in more than a decade of winners still makes the People's Choice Award one of the strongest early indicators in the awards calendar.
Whether "La Bola Negra" follows the pattern or joins "The Life of Chuck" as an outlier will depend on how it performs with broader American audiences when it hits theaters in October. Netflix has the money and the infrastructure for an aggressive campaign. The TIFF audience just gave the streamer something money cannot buy, a genuine stamp of approval from real moviegoers.
Hollywood's awards machine runs on momentum, and right now, "La Bola Negra" has plenty of it.
