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Comment by quadrige | Hacker News Reader

French cinema's current position in the world is mainly due to these kinds of stricts regulations, that allow small films to compete with big budget movies for the viewers' attention, and small theaters with big networks. Netflix, iTunes etc. are not just "normal" players in the film production business, they are also marketplaces fighting for distribution exclusivity, and they need to be regulated as such.

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As a french, I can tell you that what's french regulations are protecting is mostly garbage nobody wants to watch. For one "Amelie", you have a 1000 "les petits mouchoirs". Well I don't want my taxes to pay to protect those. Let the market decide. I already pay 13 euros for a freaking movie while I paid 5 times less 20 years ago. Netflix provides way better content than the french industry. French youtubers produce way better content that the traditional french medias. The independant scene, only getting scraps from this so called "cinema protection" does more creative content.

Let the dinausores die please.

"Amélie" is by no means a small film, just take a look at Jean-Pierre Jeunet's other films' budget to get a sense of it. By small films I mean for example : - Sayônara by Kôji Fukada - Un avant-poste du progrès by Hugo Vieira da Silva - Psiconautas by Pedro Rivero and Alberto Vázquez Those are just 3 titles coming up from Allocine that launched this week in theaters. None of them will be on Netflix. Regarding the ticket price, it's indeed around 11-13 in big circuits, but around 7 in small independant theaters, so that's a reason more to encourage them.

I never meant it was a small film.

Fair enough; my point about the visibility of small foreign films in theaters vs on Netflix still stands though.

Ticket prices in Europe are not too far from that, especially if you're talking about Paris

> Well I don't want my taxes to pay to protect those. Let the market decide.

Taxes?? This is what the Cannes festival decided, not your government.

> Netflix provides way better content than the french industry.

Then watch Netflix? Your government is not stopping you.

I suspect France has a similar system whereby the gov has essentially a tax for financing/subsidizing the film industry and that's what they're talking about.

Btw: in GER it's ~17.50€ per month per household and the "agency" collecting this money is already talking about raising this to ~20€ in a few years...

Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF...

Exactly. Most french movies make pennies at the box office and the only reason they exist is because of outrageous financing by the State. Same thing happens in other like minded countries in Europe.

Spain here, can confirm. Some producers even fake the mandatory movie screening that they need to keep the tax-funded grant. Even the freaking former president of the Spanish Cinema Academy is facing jail time over this: http://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2017-03-02/la-fiscalia...

An important distinction is that the money does not come out of your paycheck. Instead, they take 10% of what you pay on cinema tickets (including foreign movies).

You could argue that french studios also get tax breaks, but those don't actually fund movies, they just increase profits for movies that are profitable.

As a fellow Frenchman I agree. Now don't get me wrong, I am for high taxes, high social safety nets, public universities, public healthcare, and even public maintenance of the arts. I am also for public money helping promote French culture and language. But the way French cinema is incentivised is a scam on the public, it just contributes to old dinosaurs putting out garbage movies to put money in the pocket of the same big name French actors, and taking a cut in the process to fill their own pockets. I would prefer that that money was put up in the form of investment for independent filmmakers, or just diverted towards our crumbling universities.

What does it mean to be for "high taxes"? I'm for the government taxing enough to pay for whatever services it's offering but that should be as low as possible.

Governments are an extreme example of any other bureaucracy. They always find a way to spend every dollar they're collecting and usually more than that too.

I see what you mean, I expressed myself badly. Obviously the government should not be wasting the money it is collecting, and they should be taxing just enough so that they can fund the services they offer. What I mean is that I am not for cutting the number of those services just for the sake of saving a few euros.

How magnanimous! Such a generous heart.

The problem with socialism is, you eventually run out of other people's money.

Swinging things back to startups, apparently that's the problem with a lot of SV business models as well.

"You're losing money on every order?!"

"Sure but we make it up in volume!"

I'm sorry, I can't hear you, the sound of the US administrations declaring bankruptcy is too loud.

How does the social ownership of means of production even relate to what we are talking about? Or are you referring to social policies in general? In which case there are multiple models of market-based socialism, in which social benefits (public healthcare, public education, public transport, government-subsidized housing) are used to boost individuals' purchasing power (they are healthy, they can work better jobs, they can be more flexible with where they live) and inject that money into the economy by keeping a happy, healthy and educated population.

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