Finally ! After months of sleep, theaters reopened on Wednesday, May 19, with dozens of films showing. But financially, how does the film industry come out of more than a year of pandemic? Thanked for a line at the end of the credits but playing a primordial role, the main bankers of the cinema analyze the various weaknesses of this sector.
“The whole industry is leaving with a level of debt it has never known”, assures Anne Flamant, director of the cinema and audiovisual department of Neuflize OBC. Since 2020, the bank has put in place 150 State-guaranteed loans (PGE) in various cinema companies for a total amount of 100 million euros. Amounts that will have to be repaid within three or four years and which could burden the most fragile borrowers. Henri de Roquemaurel, director of the image and media division of BNP Paribas, also granted 91 PGEs to production and distribution companies and 21 to exhibitors, for a total of 144 million euros. “Amounts that vary between 8,000 euros for the little ones and more than 10 million” he explains.
These financings “Have made it possible to hold up in terms of cash flow, so much so that until now we have observed a drop in the number of bankruptcies and failures in the sector” compared to previous years, specifies Anne Flamant. But she fears that “It becomes much more difficult from the end of 2021 and into 2022”.
Interruptions and additional costs
The effect of the pandemic did not have the same impact depending on the profession, even if “All were affected”, deplores Karim Mouttalib, director general of the Institute for the financing of cinema and cultural industries (Ifcic). “The crisis has forced operators to postpone many investments”, he said. So much so that the loan guarantees and loans it grants them literally melted away in 2020, from nearly 23 million euros… to zero. If operators have resisted the crisis as best they can, it is thanks to “Partial unemployment which saved them, to PGE, to cost reductions and aid from the National Center for Cinematography (CNC)”, assures Henri de Roquemaurel. It also granted intermediate-sized operators 60 million euros in recovery loans (PPR), in order to strengthen their financial structure.
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