first assessment for the investment of Netflix, Prime and Disney+ in France

Since 2021, American platforms must invest around 20% of their turnover in European productions. A commitment respected by Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+. For a result, to date, often disappointing.

IIt’s not entirely impossible, if you love series and have trouble getting off platforms, whether you’ve watched Worship (Prime Video), The Cage (Netflix) et Children are kings (Disney+) over the past month. These three French series were produced by American platforms, and are a sign that they respect the terms of the Smad decree, which entered into force on July 1, 2021, which requires them to invest approximately 20% of their turnover. in France in French-language productions.

The Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) took stock on Tuesday and was pleased to note that the amount of spending by the three biggest studios, Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+, had increased to 866 million euros between 2021 and 2023 (163 million in films, and the rest in other genres of programs such as animation, documentaries, and especially series). We’re not going to say that this is bad news. “The commitments of major streaming players underline the strength of our cultural model, which knows how to adapt to changing uses and the market; they also highlight the desire of these actors to integrate harmoniously into this model,” welcomed Roch-Olivier Maistre, the director of Arcom.

Let us note, however, that these investments are concentrated on a few large productions, and that they are not always famous. The average cost of a film produced by a platform is 8.7 million euros, compared to 4.5 million for all French films, which does not prevent GTMax (Olivier Schneider, Netflix), Libre (Mélanie Laurent, Prime Video) and others Werewolves (François Uzan, Netflix) to cause disappointment. And to return to the series, the best French production remains Hippocrates, the third season of which can be discovered on Canal+. It must be said that linear publishers (Canal, France Télévisions, TF1, etc.) are by far the biggest contributors to French creation, with 1.2 billion euros in funding in 2022 alone.