Driven, among other things, by the flourishing of online broadcasting during the pandemic, the Quebec television industry experienced exceptional growth in 2020-2021: the total value of its productions climbed by 23%, unheard of. But the filming of foreign films and Quebec feature films, for their part, have unsurprisingly suffered from the health crisis.
This is the portrait drawn by the Observatory of Culture and Communications of Quebec in a study published on Wednesday. Quebec television productions, all genres and languages combined, totaled budgets of 815 million in 2020-2021, half of which was allocated to fiction programs.
In fact, it is mainly the amounts granted to fiction series that jumped during this first pandemic year, going from 304 million to 405 million dollars in one year. In all, 75 fiction programs were filmed in Quebec last year, barely 8 more than in 2019-2020. This means that it is above all the average budget of productions that has increased. And for good reason, a fiction producer enjoyed an average budget of $5.1 million last year, nearly $2 million more than just two years ago.
This new money comes, among other things, from foreigners who buy Quebec series to adapt them elsewhere in the world. The various online broadcasting platforms, which are thirsty for content, also have a lot to do with it. The rights paid by the traditional channels remain however the principal source of financing of the television industry, although their share is proportionally smaller than in the past.
“The increase comes from several elements: in particular projects for the year 2020 which have been postponed to 2021 [à cause de la pandémie]and [intervenants] such as Bell Media [avec Crave] which have made it possible to trigger additional French-language television projects among Quebec producers,” said the Société de développement des entreprises culturelle, one of the industry’s main public funders, by email.
The bad side of the pandemic
Other TV genres have not benefited as much from these circumstances. The production budgets of magazines and variety shows increased by a few million compared to the previous year, and the budget remained fairly stable for documentaries.
As for film production, it has suffered from the pandemic. The value of Quebec films amounted to $146 million in 2020-2021, a decrease of 14% compared to the previous year. Unsurprisingly, filming from elsewhere was much less numerous due to border restrictions: foreign productions totaled 970 million dollars last year, a drop of 258 million.
In short, despite the boom in the TV market, the audiovisual industry has seen its value decline by 6% overall, which remains enviable under the circumstances.
” [Ces résultats] testify to the resilience that our sector has shown in delivering a maximum of quality productions to Quebec audiences by successfully completing film shoots under unprecedented constraints. There are currently many challenges, as inflation, the persistence of COVID-19 and the labor shortage are increasing the pressure on the budgets of French-language productions, which are already extremely compressed,” said by press release Hélène Messier, CEO of the Quebec Association of Media Production.