Since the pandemic, attendance at dark rooms has plummeted and is worrying the profession, which is sounding the alarm. According to the CNC, dark rooms had a black month of September with 7.32 million admissions, the lowest since the 1980s and the start of statistics, with the exception of 2020.
Part of French cinema, meeting in Paris on Thursday, called for “States General“, worrying about the future of a unique financing system in the world.
This informal collective made up in particular of directors, producers, distributors and independent technicians is concerned that the public authorities, which have massively supported the sector financially since the start of the pandemic and avoided bankruptcies, prefer “support the industrial tool rather than the mechanisms of creation“.
Small structures and arthouse cinema are the first victims of public disaffection. About a third of spectators are still missing in cinemas. Another threat: the still burning issue of media chronology and the integration of platforms into the French system. This “chronology“governs the dates on which films can be broadcast, in streaming and on television in particular, in the months following their release in cinemas.
In full renegotiation of the file, Disney threatens to deprive French cinemas of the receipts of its next blockbuster Black Panther: Wakanda Foreverr, which is due out November 9 but could go straight to Disney+.
In this context, “it was time to sound the alarm in the name of the love of cinema“, said producer Judith Lou Lévy (Les Films du Bal), explaining that “These concerns are not new“.”It is not rational to work so much on our films if we are no longer certain of releasing them within three or five years… We are there! It will lack money, independent distribution companies, rooms…“, abounded Elisabeth Perez (Chaz Productions).
When the world has never had so many”need stories“, “films in the cinema are finding it more and more difficult to mount, or at least at the union level, and platforms such as TVs are asking us for plainly formatted stories, written and produced as quickly as possible, submitted to forty decision-makers“, underlined for her part the actress, screenwriter and director Agnès Jaoui.
“We have come to warn about a system that has kept cinema alive in France for decades, and from which we withdraw a little more oxygen every day.e”, added director Axelle Ropert (Little Solange). “There are many signals to question us about the choices and objectives for the future“cinema but also”culture and cultural policy” in general.