Maluma

Juan Luis Londoño Arias traded soccer cleats from the youth ranks of Atlético Nacional for a microphone in homemade booths in Medellín when he was sixteen years old. His family thought it was a teenage whim. In 2010 he recorded his first demo with money borrowed from his aunt and adopted a stage name combining the initials of his mother, his father and his sister.

Those first raw sound recordings circulated on USB drives around schools in Antioquia. There were no record labels behind him pushing his name and no digital marketing budgets.

From Dirt Fields to Packed Stadiums

Before stepping onto a film set, he filled arenas across half the continent. His album Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy dominated Latin American radio in 2015 and put Medellín at the center of the commercial music business. He didn't invent urban music, but he learned to smooth its rough edges so he could sell it to the English-speaking market without translating his lyrics into English.

Streaming numbers piled up zeros at a speed that baffled traditional industry executives. In 2018 he won the Latin Grammy for F.A.M.E. and signed contracts that earned more than one million dollars for every stop on his tours. That financial structure gave him the cushion he needed to plan his next moves with cool calculation.

Reggaeton was too small for him.

Because his ultimate goal was always tied to visual storytelling and the major studios of the West Coast.

Bastian's Tailored Suit

Hollywood often turns to music stars when it needs to draw young moviegoers to theaters. Jennifer Lopez reached out directly to co-star in the romantic comedy Marry Me, released in 2022 alongside Owen Wilson. The role of Bastian didn't require complex dramatic immersion, since he played a charming, disloyal singer consumed by fame.

During the filming days in Manhattan, he absorbed the technical discipline of lighting setups and the mechanical repetition of entire sequences. That same year he voiced the character Mariano Guzmán in Encanto, the Disney animated film that grossed more than two hundred fifty million dollars at the box office.

Nobody in the film industry expected him to come out unscathed from specialized critics.

But American critics praised his ease in front of the camera and his timing with comedic beats. Instead of passively waiting for the phone to ring with secondary offers, he decided to build his own business structure.

Total Control Behind the Camera

In 2022, he founded Royalty Films, his production company with operating offices in Medellín and Miami. He wanted to direct his promotional pieces and manage narrative projects without going through middleman agencies. His first foray behind the camera came with directing the music video Mojando asientos, shot on 16mm film.

The producer expanded her reach by directing commercials for high-fashion brands and conceptual short films tied to her music release Don Juan from 2023. In the editing suite, she supervises the final cuts and frame-by-frame color corrections.

And the commercial move paid off.

In 2024, Royalty Films closed co-production deals to develop two feature films shot in Colombia with fixed budgets of four million dollars per title under the tax exemptions of the national film law.