I feel dumb, but sometimes news just gets past me, especially since all this is just a hobby. I have been waiting all summer for the return of Álex de la Iglesia’s 30 COINS. Yeah, I know, it isn’t coming thanks to some idiot named David Zaslav, and somehow I missed the news that the third season was not going to be shown on HBO or HBO Max.
I last wrote of 30 COINS when I reviewed the final episodes of the second season back in December of 2023. I wondered at the end of that post, if you care to look, if it was going to be picked up for Season Three. Since it is a Spanish production, I thought that news of its progress was just slow to reach the U. S. or that there were some setbacks or that, if I had missed anything, it was that Paul Giamatti was not keen on returning. I thought then that it would arrive sometime in 2025, and I have waited to no avail. I thought, “Surely by the end of summer it would have appeared.” So, I finally investigated only to discover that it was not renewd by HBO back in 2024.
To verify all this, I went to a Spanish source for the facts. The show’s creator announced on May 20, 2024, that Max (as HBO Max was called then) did not renew the show. Spain’s FormulaTV wrote –
“’30 monedas’ will not be renewed”, De la Iglesia began, through his account on the social network X, where he also revealed that the decision had been made despite the fact that “the chapters of the last season are written”, as well as the fact that “the story was conceived from the beginning as a trilogy” that, now, would be incomplete. ’30 coins’ is part of my life. I’m going to do the impossible to finish it .”
That led me to wonder if de la Iglesia (pictured) was successful in completing the third and final season as written and if there was somewhere I could watch it. If you follow the show, you know it ended on a cliffhanger, as some of the characters were now in an alternative universe, in a different version of Pedraza. I’m afraid we may never know what happens.
Though the first two seasons of the action/horror series are still viewable on HBO Max (and ideal for a Halloween rewatch), it appears that any further adventures of Father Vergara (Eduard Fernández) will not happen on HBO or anywhere. There is no indication that anyone has picked up on the work for de la Iglesia to realize his dream of completing the series. He has since moved onto a comedic series entitled Entrepreneurs for a ten-episode run on Spanish TV and crafting a movie for 2026, a thriller called La Cuidadora (The Caregiver). Well, I hope someday soon, Alex de la Iglesia will get to conclude 30 COINS, and I hope I get to see it. Until then, goodbye 30 COINS.
