Erik Matti is building a bigger, darker world — and Netflix is stepping in to amplify it.
At JAFF Creative Asia 2025 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the celebrated Filipino filmmaker revealed BuyBust: The Undesirables, his very first project with Netflix, marking a major expansion of the gritty universe he first introduced in 2018.
Anne Curtis will star alongside Gerald Anderson and Indonesian auteur Joko Anwar.
After BuyBust sparked conversation in 2018, Matti and the streaming platform set out to build a nine-episode series slated for 2026.
“We moved on from the drug war story and we made it about rich and poor — the powerful and the powerless. We wanted to talk about the Philippines as a country and whether it was impossible to ‘clean it up’ without going political. We are focusing on real characters and the real conflicts of each of them,” Matti said.
BuyBust: The Undesirables follows a vengeful ex-cop and a disgraced corporate worker who becomes tangled in the murder of a senator’s daughter and the search for a drug lord called Judas. Their investigation leads them out of the Capital and into Matungao, where they must uncover Judas’s true identity and face a harsh reality: justice is costly, and in this city, no one is safe.