El Rubius

Rubén Doblas Gundersen grasped the rhythm of audiovisual editing before many directors trained at film schools. In 2006 he opened his first YouTube channel armed with a cheap capture card and home editing software. Those videos, with aggressive cuts and digital zooms, invented a visual language of their own for a generation that turned its back on dark movie theaters.

In 2014, Santiago Segura saw the pull of that social audience and gave him a brief role in Torrente 5: Operación Eurovegas. The Spanish box office took in more than ten million euros with that release, proving that the presence of digital creators on screen drew real audiences to commercial theaters.

Nobody on television understood anything.

From Bedroom to the Red Carpet at Sitges

The move into animated fiction came with the adaptation of his comic Virtual Hero, originally published in 2015. Movistar+ financed the animated series of the same name in 2018, produced with Zeppelin TV and the Catalan studio Motion Pictures. The show premiered in the official selection of the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, directed by Alexis Barroso.

Doblas took on the role of creator and voice actor for his own animated alter ego. The project skipped conventional children's formats and embraced a Japanese anime aesthetic produced between Madrid and South Korea. And although the script leaned too heavily on self-referential winks, the first season's twelve episodes sustained an unusual technical showcase for a Spanish platform.

In 2020, the platform premiered a second season of six episodes with a much darker tone and fights animated in traditional style.

And the film industry took notice.

Hollywood, Express Box Office and the Documentary Toll

Multinational distributors soon changed their promotional strategy in Spain. In 2019, Sony Pictures recruited the creator to dub a supporting character in the Spanish-language version of Men in Black: International. The move sparked complaints from the professional voice-acting guild, but theaters filled their morning screenings with teenage viewers.

In 2022, Doblas had a silent cameo in the American blockbuster Uncharted alongside Tom Holland. Filming took place at the National Art Museum of Catalonia, and he ended up with just three seconds in the final cut. The Spanish branch used that fleeting cameo to dominate social media interactions ahead of the premiere.

That same 2022, the documentary feature Rubius X premiered on Prime Video to mark ten years of online videos. Directed by Pedro Ample, the film explored the anxiety of domestic confinement and the psychological effects of mass exposure without falling into condescending hagiography. The camera followed a creator overwhelmed in his own apartment while dodging hundreds of followers camped out on the sidewalk.

In 2023, the four-episode miniseries Rubius: Next Level Japan arrived, produced by Warner Bros ITVP and NOOB Studios. The show blended the traditional travel journal with animated scenes and scripted humor on a budget that exceeded six hundred thousand euros.

Filming in Tokyo wrapped up two weeks late due to filming restrictions in the Shibuya district.