1.
Two documents this week, concerning the same instrument, pointing in opposite directions.
In Le Monde, more than 170 French filmmakers — Jacques Audiard, Justine Triet, the Dardenne brothers, Claire Denis, Costa-Gavras and Mati Diop among them — warned that the 2027 finance bill “risks wiping French cinema from our screens on a scale never seen before.” A day later the American Entertainment Alliance surfaced: CAA, WME and UTA, alongside producers including Jason Blum, Peter Chernin, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, whose first legislative priority is a federal law requiring streamers to spend “at least 50% of their production budgets on independent productions.”
One system is asking to have an investment obligation built. The other is about to lose the one it has.
2.
America had the instrument and got rid of it. The Financial Interest and Syndication Rules stopped the networks owning what they broadcast; the FCC spent most of a decade trying to kill them and succeeded in 1993, after which production moved in-house and stayed there. The coalition’s public case rests on what the rules produced — Seinfeld, Hill Street Blues, Mary Tyler Moore. It is a thirty-year-old argument assembled from a thirty-year-old schedule, and the uncomfortable part is that it is the correct argument.
CAA’s Bryan Lourd put the case in one line: “Distribution is not the issue of the future. Who finances content is the issue.” He is right. He is also describing the business he is in, which is worth saying out loud: an agency’s revenue is a percentage of what its clients are paid, so a rule forcing commissioning outside the buyer’s own walls enlarges the pool that percentage comes out of. That is not a scandal. It is just the shape of the interest, and coalitions are permitted to want things.
3.
The French document is the more instructive of the two, because it describes an obligation built with a trapdoor in it.
The measure under debate is a doubling of VAT on pay-television subscriptions, from 10% to 20%. Mechanically that is a revenue question and nothing to do with film. But a cross-industry agreement signed at the end of July provides that any VAT increase for Canal+ voids its cinema investment obligations. So the obligation never has to be repealed, debated or voted down. It lapses when a rate moves.
The signatories put the consequence at €750m less for film creation between 2028 and 2032: “Very concretely, over a five-year period, this means 400 films simply will not exist.” Separately, the budget’s general rapporteur has proposed a €35m levy on CNC resources, and France Télévisions — which helps finance around seventy films a year — is set to fall €47m by 2027. The letter also makes a point that will be unfamiliar to anyone who assumes public money: the CNC runs on earmarked taxes on tickets, television, streaming and private copying, so “French cinema therefore runs without costing taxpayers a single cent.”
4.
A commissioning obligation is the oldest patronage instrument there is. Guild statutes reserving work for local masters, altarpiece contracts specifying ultramarine by weight and the number of figures, percent-for-art ordinances — the device is always the same. The money is going to be spent regardless. The rule decides where it lands and who gets to be the person who made the thing.
What the record also shows is that these instruments are never dismantled on the grounds that the art has stopped needing them. They go because the definition stopped matching the business — network against studio, in 1993 — or because they were never load-bearing in anybody’s accounts except the accounts of the people they were load-bearing for.
Which is where the two documents meet. The American ask is a number: fifty per cent. The number is the easy half. The reporting describes the beneficiaries loosely as American, non-studio productions, and no statutory test has been published; the definition is the instrument. Fin-syn did not die at the percentage, it died at the boundary. France has spent decades litigating that boundary in detail, which is precisely why France has obligations worth €750m to fight over.
5.
The thing worth noticing is not that one country is building and the other dismantling. It is that the two conversations are not touching. The coalition’s case is made from American television of the 1970s. The French letter is made from a spreadsheet running to 2032. Neither one cites the other, and the instrument under discussion is the same instrument.
What I would watch is the definition. If a bill arrives with a percentage and a vague non-studio test, it will be captured inside a decade by companies that are independent the way a wholly owned subsidiary is independent. If it arrives with a real boundary — ownership thresholds, who holds copyright, who is allowed to be the buyer — then somebody has read the French file.
And the French file’s lesson this week is not that obligations work. It is narrower and worse. An obligation that lapses when a tax rate changes was never an obligation. It was a tenancy.
Sources
- “2027 budget: French cinema fears a catastrophic scenario”, Jean-Philippe Liabot, Euronews, 15 October 2026 — the Le Monde op-ed, the pay-TV VAT doubling, the July agreement voiding Canal+’s investment obligations, the €750m and 400-film figures, the CNC levy and the France Télévisions reduction.
- “Budget 2027 : plus de 170 cinéastes s’alarment du doublement de la TVA de Canal+”, Télésatellite — signatory count and the VAT measure.
- “CAA, WME and UTA Team With Ron Howard and Jason Blum to Push for Indie Productions”, Drew Taylor, TheWrap, 15 October 2026 — the Alliance’s membership, the legislative ask and the Lourd quotation, reported from The New York Times.
- “Talent agencies, producers say streamers should be legally required to spend money on indie projects”, Matt Schimkowitz, The A.V. Club, 15 October 2026 — the 50% language, the fin-syn history and the 1993 repeal.
I have not seen the Le Monde op-ed in the original, the July cross-industry agreement, or any draft of the American bill, and the last of those does not appear to exist in public yet. Everything above is read from the reporting named.