Netflix’s Billionaires’ Bunker isn’t Money Heist 2.0 even if it carries its DNA

From the moment Billionaires’ Bunker appeared on Netflix, the shadow of Money Heist became impossible to ignore. That shadow is not accidental. It exists because Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato, the same creative minds behind Money Heist, are again orchestrating a drama about confined spaces, desperate power struggles, and the illusion of control.

The association is deliberate, and audiences recognize the familiarity at once. But to confuse Billionaires’ Bunker with a sequel or a spinoff is to miss what makes it provocative. It doesn’t recycle the heist formula. Instead, it carries forward the DNA of Money Heist and mutates it into something colder, more insidious, and perhaps more unsettling.

Money Heist was about storming the fortress of the state, demanding attention and disrupting order with symbols too powerful to ignore. Billionaires’ Bunker is about what happens when the fortress already belongs to the privileged and the threat is not invasion but implosion. It’s an inversion that keeps the pulse alive while refusing to repeat the rhythm.

The weight of inevitable comparison

When Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) exploded into a global phenomenon, it didn’t remain a local Spanish drama. It became a worldwide shorthand for defiance. Red jumpsuits, Salvador Dalí masks, the chant of “Bella Ciao,” and the city code names were instantly recognizable. Even people who never watched the show could identify its symbols. It was branding in the strongest sense: iconography that jumped off the screen into the streets, onto costumes, into protests, and into collective memory.

That kind of impact reshapes the landscape. Any narrative about confinement, power, and class conflict has to be measured against it. Billionaires’ Bunker enters the cultural conversation with that weight already pressing down. It doesn’t matter if the story is different; audiences arrive primed to compare, to look for echoes, to decide whether this is Money Heist reborn or something entirely distinct. The comparison is not only inevitable but embedded into how the show is received.

The series leans into that inevitability. Instead of running from the legacy, it acknowledges the lineage and then rewrites it. Where Money Heist went for grand displays, Billionaires’ Bunker relies on restraint.Where the heist demanded solidarity, the bunker cultivates paranoia. It’s the same lineage but flipped inside out.

From heist to gilded refuge

The fundamental inversion between the two shows lies in the direction of conflict. In Money Heist, outsiders storm the mint and occupy the state’s fortress. The heist is confrontation, an invasion designed to reveal corruption and inequality through an act of defiance. The robbers are strangers united by the Professor’s plan, fighting against external pressure from the police and the government. The fortress is a prison they choose, a stage for revolution.

In Billionaires’ Bunker, the fortress is already owned by the powerful. There is no act of invasion. The elite willingly lock themselves away, believing they are escaping collapse. The Kimera Underground Park is supposed to be salvation, but salvation quickly mutates into confinement. The danger is not outside trying to break in but inside corroding trust. Where Money Heist staged a collective performance of rebellion, Billionaires’ Bunker stages a quiet disintegration of privilege.

This difference is crucial. The tension of Money Heist was explosive, outward facing, and built for maximum showmanship. The tension of Billionaires’ Bunker is implosive, inward facing, and designed for psychological suffocation. The claustrophobia remains, but the source of the suffocation changes entirely. And that change reframes the politics of confinement: in one, confinement is weaponized against the system; in the other, confinement reveals the rot within the system itself.

Inequality as the recurring villain

Despite their differences, both Money Heist and Billionaires’ Bunker orbit the same gravitational force: inequality. In Money Heist, inequality is the adversary to be fought, the justification for robbing the mint, the moral rationale behind the masks and chants. The robbers oppose the machinery of the state, and the audience is invited to cheer for the rebellion because the state is revealed as corrupt and cruel.

In Billionaires’ Bunker, inequality doesn’t appear as a system to attack but as a toxin that poisons from within. The wealthy characters believe they have escaped danger, but their privilege becomes its own prison. Isolation amplifies paranoia, resentment, and betrayal. Every glance carries suspicion. Every shared meal feels rehearsed, as if the performance of community is already breaking down. What suffocates them is not an outside enemy but the weight of their own advantages, turned against one another.

That's the twist: inequality is the recurring villain across both series, but the battlefield shifts. In Money Heist, the battle is open and spectacular. In Billionaires’ Bunker, the battle is hidden, intimate, corrosive. The two together map a cycle: resistance at the gates, implosion behind the gates, always circling the same unresolved wound.

The branding and DNA of Money Heist

To say Billionaires’ Bunker carries the DNA of Money Heist is to point to more than creative pedigree. It means inheriting a set of recognizable traits that turned the earlier show into cultural shorthand. Money Heist established a kind of genetic code for how stories of rebellion are staged and remembered.

The red jumpsuit and Dalí mask are perhaps the most visible part of this DNA. They transformed ordinary characters into collective symbols, dissolving individuality into uniform identity. The mask became a global signifier of defiance, appearing in protests across continents.

The use of “Bella Ciao” turned a historical anthem into a pop-cultural rallying cry, looping together fiction and reality. The codename system, where characters were known by city names like Tokyo and Berlin, stripped away personal backstory to emphasize archetype and myth. The visual language was strict, banning certain colors on screen and heightening the contrast of red against muted palettes. This attention to design made the show recognizable in a single frame.

Beyond the screen, the DNA extended into the marketplace. Costumes were sold everywhere, the imagery showed up in advertising, and Netflix itself pushed Money Heist as Spain’s cultural export. Spin-offs like Berlin ensured the legacy could continue in new forms without diluting recognition. The DNA of Money Heist is not just narrative—it’s branding, iconography, and emotional shorthand that audiences decode instantly.

This is what Billionaires’ Bunker inherits. It doesn’t copy the masks or the music, but it steps into the cultural memory that Money Heist created. Audiences expect symbols. They expect confinement as metaphor. They expect inequality as theme. That is the DNA at work: the coded expectation that shapes how the new story is read, even before the first scene ends.

What Billionaires’ Bunker borrows — and what it rejects

Billionaires’ Bunker borrows from Money Heist the cadence of suspense in a closed environment and the conviction that stories about confinement can reveal more than simple survival. It borrows the interest in blurred morality, the fascination with how pressure transforms people, and the belief that symbols matter. Those traits are part of the DNA, and they surface naturally.

But Billionaires’ Bunker also rejects the grandiosity that made Money Heist iconic. There are no Dalí masks, no red jumpsuits, no chants designed to echo in the streets. The bunker doesn’t lend itself to public demonstration. Its symbols are subtler: the sterile architecture of luxury, the rules and restrictions that govern life underground, the invisible fear that someone is always watching. The DNA is there, but it’s expressed in a different form, adapted to a different organism.

This act of rejection is itself a statement. Billionaires’ Bunker acknowledges the DNA but insists on mutation. It refuses to provide easy costumes or chants for the audience to replicate. Instead, it offers unease and ambiguity, demanding viewers confront the discomfort of privilege under pressure.

The shadow and the provocation

To reduce Billionaires’ Bunker to “Money Heist underground,” though, is lazy criticism. The point is not to deny the connection but to interrogate it. By carrying the DNA of Money Heist, the new series places itself in dialogue with its predecessor, asking what happens when the tools of rebellion are locked away, when privilege becomes the prison, when symbols dissolve into silence.

The provocation lies in the mutation. Money Heist offered collective action and public symbols; Billionaires’ Bunker offers isolation and fractured trust. The two shows are mirrors facing each other: one external, one internal, both reflecting inequality as the real apocalypse. By carrying Money Heist’s DNA, Billionaires’ Bunker proves that the same wound can be staged in multiple ways, each revealing new fractures in the world we live in.

In the end, the inheritance is not a burden. And that's the point. The DNA is not costume or chant but the conviction that confinement is the most honest metaphor for our age. Whether in a mint full of hostages or a bunker full of billionaires, the question is always the same: who is really safe when inequality locks the doors?