Save the movies: while the cinemas have been closed since Saturday March 14 due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the entire cinema industry is both full of ideas and teeming with ideas. On the distributors’ side, the question arises of the flow of films suddenly deprived of the big screen. In France, a country which has more than 5,000 screens on its territory (and some 2,200 establishments), indoor cinema is sacred and obeys a rule, the “media chronology” written in stone: it provides exclusivity for the room lasting four months, before the release of video on demand (VoD), on television channels, etc.
What then to do with the works which were in exploitation on March 14? Should we put them to sleep and wait for their careers to resume when the cinemas reopen? This will undoubtedly be the solution chosen for a certain number of films. In a column published in French Film, Friday March 27, the president of the powerful National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF), Richard Patry, underlined “The aspiration of our members [exploitants] to support the films of distributors who were by their side until the end “, and to offer them “Again to their spectators” as soon as the rooms reopen. The fact remains that no one has a clue about the date of resumption – China, which reopened 600 theaters the weekend of March 21-22, announced their closure again on March 27.
In addition, when you know that about twenty new films were to be released every Wednesday – March 18, March 25, 1er April, April 8, etc. -, the reopening of cinemas looks like a huge traffic jam, with the risk that films with low potential are found, even more than usual, drowned in the masses. It’s a safe bet that the majority of operators will favor family comedies and other blockbusters to revive the economy of the sector.
New provisional rules
With spectators confined, VoD with fee-for-service could present an alternative and a valve for the sector. Television itself has already found pharaonic scores with more than 6 million viewers, on March 27, for the fifth episode of Koh Lanta on TF1. To the point that some people wonder if we shouldn’t be putting out author films on television. The time of the health crisis, the small screen would again become a cinephile … The fact remains that the profession seems ready to experiment with new, provisional rules, under the patronage of the National Center of Cinema and Animated Image (CNC).
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