VSAs Jacques Chirac said, one day in great shape, “Shit, it always flies in squadron”. This is true for French cinema. Nearly one in two regulars is reluctant to return to the restaurant. The influx of films, long frozen by the pandemic, turns into a game of massacre and causes tensions between programmers. The sofa culture, boosted by domestic screens, is installed. And now Netflix, its best enemy, with 210 million subscribers worldwide, has just created a discord in its ranks. A psychodrama that hides much bigger clouds on the horizon.
The American platform wanted to present, around mid-December, some of its new films in around ten theaters classified Art & Essay. Before offering them to its subscribers. It was no longer a matter of guest previews, as Netflix was able to do, but of showing a film several times during a week, in front of a large audience that pays its place.
It was new. To the point of constituting a departure from the principle that a film projected on the big screen must wait three years before being offered by a platform for subscribers. This rule aims to protect cinemas by ensuring them a wide window of exclusivity, and, more broadly, to defend the diversity of films, especially those closer to reflection than entertainment. For many, this event was meant to bring the Netflix wolf into the fold. “A suicide”, we heard. In the face of indignation, the event will be reduced to two institutional venues, the Cinémathèque française, in Paris, and the Institut Lumière, in Lyon.
Artistic legitimacy
Incident closed? We’ll see. But the basic stake is still there. Which touches on the role and power of the room, and how Netflix wants to use it. The platform needs it, to gain artistic legitimacy. She only needs them for her most prestigious films (her showcase) and not for long – a few days – so that they make people talk, make people want, get awards at festivals. With the aim of promoting the essential, which is then played out: attracting as many subscribers as possible to the platform.
Two films among others, which Netflix planned to screen in a handful of French theaters in December, have this profile. The Power of the Dog, by Jane Campion, the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes (in 1993), is one of the most anticipated works of the year – Netflix will offer it to its subscribers on the 1er December.
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