Jude Law, canceled; Natalie Portman, canceled; Julianne Moore, canceled… The Deauville American Film Festival, which opens on Friday 1er September, will have to do without the Hollywood stars who, beyond the films, have made its reputation since 1975. By joining, at the beginning of the summer, the scriptwriters’ strike, the powerful association of American actors, the Screen Actors Guild ( SAG) has, in fact, deprived the cinema of its glitter. But not only.
“It’s not just that: this strike is upsetting the entire release calendar, laments the French distributor and producer Michèle Halberstadt. This comes at the worst time, when we had just recovered from the closure linked to the pandemic. » What will the cinema economy look like in 2024, if American blockbusters are missing? Economic crisis, but also political and societal.
It all started four months ago. In the absence of an agreement reached with the studios and streaming platforms, the 11,500 screenwriters grouped within the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike. They claim three things. First, guaranteed salaries while the studios are increasingly shortening their intervention and writing times, especially on series – it’s classic. Second, an overhaul of residual rights (broadcasting rights) rendered obsolete by platforms that do not communicate their viewing figures – it’s more complicated. And, thirdly, regulation in the face of the threats of artificial intelligence experienced less and less as a tool and more and more as competition – that’s where it gets tricky.
“It’s the strike of a technological breakthrough that makes me think of the one that took place in 1960, when television appeared”, analyzes Xavier Lardoux, long director of cinema and audiovisual at the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image. The combined movement of actors and scriptwriters which, for the first time, brought Hollywood to a standstill (with a certain Ronald Reagan as chief negotiator) came at the end of a decade of massive television equipment. America no longer needed to go to the cinema to see cinema. Out of this came the agreement on residual rights, which the opacity of the platforms is now undermining after a decade of the rise of streaming and Gafam (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), which both trade maps and the geography of power. The arrival of ChatGPT will have put ordinary mortals in front of the obvious: the algorithm, this friend who wants us well, has sounded the death knell for old balances.
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