- Emmanuel Macron unveiled the main lines of his "culture plan" on Wednesday.
- While the filming of films and series has been stopped since mid-March, the Head of State announced two measures to support audiovisual creation.
- The President announced the creation of a temporary compensation fund.
- Emmanuel Macron intends to require foreign "platforms", such as Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV +, a "contribution".
Interrupted filming and productions stopped since mid-March. The health crisis is also a major blow for the audiovisual industry. The President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron and the Minister of Culture Franck Riester met on Wednesday for two hours of videoconference with 12 artists. The Head of State then announced the broad outlines of his "culture plan". How will the State support French audiovisual production?
"It will be very hard to resume filming in a concrete way, with a few exceptions, before the end of May," said Emmanuel Macron. The head of state "hopes, if things go well", a resumption of filming "case by case" in "June July".
The establishment of a temporary compensation fund
"We have to help the artists, the structures, the producers," declared the President of the Republic. The head of state announced the establishment of a "temporary compensation fund" for the filming of series and films, canceled or postponed due to the coronavirus crisis.
For this temporary compensation fund which will be used “on a case-by-case basis”, Emmanuel Macron wants the Ministry of Culture to work in close collaboration with the National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC), the regions but also private partners. "Insurers, banks, Sofica, must come with us to help us and set up this temporary compensation fund," he said. "We are going to put insurers, Sofica before their responsibilities," he insisted, adding that all year long they live on audiovisual creation.
A few days ago, the producers of fiction had warned that they would not resume filming without a guarantee fund.
The cost of filming will increase by 10 to 30%
The new constraints and regulations linked to the Covid-19 and to the application of barrier gestures will lead to an extension of the production time for cinematographic and advertising films.
"The resumption of filming will sometimes be at the cost of adapting the scripts and always the conditions of filming," warned Wednesday the association of communication consulting agencies (AACC) and the alliance of producers of advertising films (APFP ). These two professional organizations expect an increase in the cost of filming "between 10% and 30% on average"
The AACC and the APFP will soon publish two documents describing the actions to be implemented when shooting advertising and cinematographic films.
The production will have to be consulted on the respect of the sanitary conditions "before submission of the projects", "the number of people present on the turning must be limited", and the turning will have, "except major impossibility" to be carried out in France, warn the AACC and APFP.
Channel advertising revenue dropped 50%
In addition, while we observe a historic increase in the time spent by the French in front of television since the beginning of confinement, the channels, one of the main sources of financing for the French audiovisual sector, face a fall of at least 50% of their advertising revenue for the months of April and May, according to Les Echos . "Several brands plan not to communicate before the end of the summer," explains our colleagues, Jean-Luc Chetrit, director of the Union des Marques.
In this context, Emmanuel Macron intends to require foreign "platforms", such as Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV +, a "contribution" to French and European audiovisual creation. The president announced that the directive on the services of audio-visual mediums (SMA), obliging the platforms to conform to the French cultural exception, "will have to be transposed before the end of the year".
Platforms like Netflix will have to contribute from January 1, 2021
"We must also succeed in protecting our catalogs of French cinematographic works thanks to the SMA directive," he added. "The platforms would be subject to funding obligations from January 1, 2021," he said. To put all this in place, the Head of State relies on the joint work of the Ministry of Culture and the CNC.
This text was initially included in the major audiovisual reform, which will not be able to be examined in the near future due to the coronavirus. While linear services like TF1 or M6 will have to invest at least 16% of their turnover in France in the production of French and European works, non-linear services like Netflix will also have to contribute, if not more. The Minister of Culture had mentioned a minimum of 25%.
It must be said that with the closure of cinemas, streaming platforms are the big winners of containment in the audiovisual industry. Netflix has strengthened its leadership position and now has 183 million subscribers. The platform attracted 15.8 million new paying subscribers from January to March, against 9.6 million over the same period last year, according to its results release published on April 21.
The firm of Reed Hastings and Audiens, a social protection group in the culture sector, have already created in early April an "emergency aid fund for intermittent artists and technicians in the audiovisual and film industries" , hard hit by the coronavirus crisis, in collaboration with the CNC. Netflix contributed one million euros to the creation of this French emergency social assistance fund, as part of its global support fund for the entertainment industry, launched on March 20 with a overall envelope of $ 100 million.
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- Covid 19
- Television
- Cinema
- Culture
- Series
- Coronavirus
- Emmanuel Macron