Net­flix will make inroads into French film by part­ner­ing with Ciné­math­èque Française

Between the exis­ten­tial threat stream­ing pos­es to the cin­e­ma and the con­tin­ued cam­paign of cross-cul­tur­al offense waged by Emi­ly in Paris, it’s no stretch to say that Net­flix has a con­tentious rela­tion­ship to the French film indus­try. But the stream­ing giant will not be deterred in their quest to gain a foothold in this unfriend­ly mar­ket, and they’re going to get one big step clos­er in light of an unex­pect­ed announce­ment today.

A post on Dead­line broke the news that Net­flix has inked a three-year deal as the major spon­sor of the Ciné­math­èque Française, a sig­nif­i­cant pil­lar in French cinephil­ia. They’ve part­nered in the past — Net­flix fund­ed the Cinémathèque’s restora­tion of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in 2019, and recent­ly threw a ritzy Euro pre­mière screen­ing of Glass Onion in the august Hen­ri Lan­glois audi­to­ri­um — but this new con­tract will give the dig­i­tal-first upstart a fuller pres­ence with their logo stamped on reper­to­ry pro­gram­ming, mas­ter­class­es, and festivals.

With tick­et sales way down in the States, France has been care­ful­ly pro­tec­tive of their brick-and-mor­tar movie hous­es, safe­guard­ing against stream­ers by pass­ing a law that man­dates a 15-month wait­ing peri­od between a giv­en film’s debut in cin­e­mas and its upload to online chan­nels. (And that’s the com­pro­mised ver­sion — the exclu­siv­i­ty win­dow used to be three years.) The Cannes Film Fes­ti­val has also ruled that every title to play in their com­pet­i­tive sec­tions must get a the­atri­cal release in France, leav­ing Netflix’s unam­bigu­ous end goal of killing pub­lic exhi­bi­tion in a dif­fi­cult spot.

Get­ting the Net­flix name out there in France, par­tic­u­lar­ly in con­junc­tion with an insti­tu­tion seen as syn­ony­mous with ded­i­ca­tion to the sev­enth art, could go a ways toward endear­ing them to an art-con­scious pop­u­la­tion cur­rent­ly keep­ing the enfant ter­ri­ble stu­dio at arm’s length. The com­pa­ny opened a Paris pro­duc­tion office in 2020; clear­ly, they plan on being around for a while to come.

There’s a busi­ness strat­e­gy called the Lit­tle Bighorn, where­in a com­pa­ny hop­ing to expand into a resis­tant new ter­ri­to­ry first estab­lish­es itself in the sur­round­ing areas to cre­ate demand. Net­flix rec­og­nizes that win­ning the hearts and minds of the French peo­ple rep­re­sents the first step to infil­trat­ing their cin­e­mat­ic cul­ture, and posi­tion­ing them­selves as a friend to the art­house (not unlike their takeover of the Paris The­ater in New York) could very well pave the way to the fes­ti­vals and mul­ti­plex­es in their crosshairs.