Karol G sheds her armor in new Netflix doc ‘Tomorrow Was Beautiful’

When director Cristina Costantini set out to make a documentary about Karol G’s record-breaking stadium tour, she knew she didn’t want to create a flashy publicity piece that screamed: “It’s so great and fun to be a pop star.”

“I was interested in making something a little bit more complex that [gets] at who Karol G is and the toll that [the tour] took on her,” says Costantini in a video call.

Luckily for the filmmaker, the Colombian superstar — a documentary aficionado herself — also wasn’t looking to produce a filtered highlight reel about the glitzy stardom life. After all, anyone who has followed Karol G’s rise to fame would know it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

“As a role model, I don’t think it was right [to] show myself as always being strong, or as a boss,” says Karol G in a separate call. “I think showing my vulnerability, obstacles I’ve had to overcome are part of what this documentary means to me.”

Premiering May 8 on Netflix, “Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful,” is a behind-the-scenes look into the making of her “Mañana Será Bonito” tour: the highest-grossing and most attended tour by a Latina artist in history. Woven into the storyline are the many hurdles Karol had to face as a woman coming up in the male-dominated urban genre known as reggaeton.

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“Karol’s success is because she leaned into her femininity,” says Costantini, referring to the singer’s pink and bedazzled stage wear — which, given the odds stacked against her gender, now seems more like an armor.

On-screen, Karol gets personal from the jump, revealing the intense emotional turmoil surrounding her split from Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA in 2021. Although audiences are spared from the most private details of their breakup, it helped spur the writing process of her chart-topping 2023 LP, “Mañana Será Bonito,” and set the scene for her 2023 world tour.

“ I think in order to understand your motivating incident in the film, you have to understand that there was trauma here,” says Costantini, who is also credited as an executive producer of the doc. “But out of that pain came something really beautiful.”

Karol admits she has watched her Netflix documentary multiple times, but never in the company of others. “It’s difficult when you have to open that personal door to the world,” she says in her singsong Spanish.

(Netflix)

However, one thing is clear: Karol’s romantic life is not the focal point of this documentary. Viewers get a closer look at how the 34-year-old transforms from a past version of herself every night of the tour, as she’s shown mounting an iron-steel shark on stage — a symbol of her alter ego as the self-proclaimed “Bichota,” a feminized slang term for “big shot” that originated from Puerto Rican gangster culture. The film crew, comprised mostly of women, captured Karol’s most vulnerable moments in the documentary, including details that have never before been revealed to the public.

“[The documentary is] really important to me because I show people the ups and downs of life, feelings of sadness and joy, of confidence and low self-esteem,” says Karol.

Although Karol is constantly thinking ahead in her career —  “check, check, que sigue, what’s next?” she says — the film has given her pause to reflect on how far she’s truly come. “I never had that opportunity to stop and look back at everything I’ve accomplished from the beginning,” she marvels.

Born Carolina Giraldo Navarro in Medellín, the Colombian singer always dreamed of capturing the hearts of an audience through her voice. Home videos taken by family members illuminate her origin story as an ambitious teen who competed in her country’s version of “The X Factor”; she later opened for reggaeton legend Don Omar in Cartagena.

(Netflix)

At one point, Karol believed she needed to contort herself to the liking of the mainstream audience by learning English and moving to another country to be successful. Yet after watching the 1997 biopic of Selena Quintanilla, who excelled as a woman in the male-dominated Tejano genre, Karol held on strong to her roots and leaned on the Latino community to rally behind her.

“If there’s one thing [Selena] helped me with, it’s that I haven’t had to disguise who I am today to be successful,” says Karol, who pays tribute to the late singer in her 2023 cumbia hit, “Mi Ex Tenía Razón.”

“If it wasn’t for my Latino community, I would not have gotten far,” she adds.

Karol’s breakthrough in the industry came in 2017 with the release of “Ahora Me Llama” with Bad Bunny, a cut from her debut album “Unstoppable.” And in the years that followed, the singer would top the Latin charts with hits like “Tusa” with Nicki Minaj, “El Makinón” with Mariah Angeliq, “Bichota” and more. Yet everything changed with the release of her fourth studio album, 2023’s “Mañana Será Bonito,” in which she unraveled her heartache to the public with intimate songs like “Provenza” and scorching collabs like “TQG” alongside Shakira.

“I feel that I’ve grown in the public eye. It hasn’t been a process that came out of nowhere,” says Karol.

The platinum-certified LP was the first all-Spanish language album by a woman to reach No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200. Her follow up disc, “Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season),” also snagged the third spot on the chart. Both titles and the subsequent success served as an affirmation to herself that tomorrow will be beautiful; and indeed, this documentary sets out to prove that it really can be.

“Sooner or later, [good] things will happen, that’s what I want people to take away when they watch this,” says Karol.