Disney EMEA President Takes Aim At France’s “Uniquely Complicated & Complex” Film & TV Ecosystem

France’s state-backed film and TV financing ecosystem, which is underpinned by investment obligations for all content distributors and strict media chronology laws, is the envy of audiovisual professionals worldwide around the world.

But not everyone is a fan.  

Disney’s EMEA boss Jan Koeppen revealed near irritation with France’s protective system in an interview with the FT on Friday, in which he laid out $5B content investment plans for Europe.

Detailing the characteristics of different territories in the region, he praised Spain for its “tax advantages and investments in infrastructure”, but was frosty about France.

He described the country’s audiovisual landscape as “uniquely complicated and complex “, adding: “It restricts competition, and it restricts consumer choice…We normally want to get our content to customers in the way that they can best enjoy it.”

Under France’s current windowing rules, global platforms including Disney and Amazon are subject to a 17-month gap between the theatrical and online release of a feature film, while Netflix has negotiated a 15-month window in return for extra investment in local movies. Prior to the new rules, the window was 36 months.

Disney has been pushing back against these windows for years.

The situation last came to a head in the wake of pandemic, when theatrical releases were under pressure, with the studio announcing in June, 2022 that it was the skipping the theatrical release of Strange World in France to put it directly on Disney Plus, as a result of the chronology rules.

The film released theatrically in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world on November, 2022.

Koeppen told FT that Disney was talking to the French authorities to see if the system could be “modernised”.

“We’ll work with the different parties to see if that can be done,” he said.

The current windowing law, which took effect in February 2022, took more than a decade to negotiate, and was due to last for three years from that point.

Any move to shorten the windows in favor of the global platforms is likely to meet with pushback from France’s powerful exhibition sector, which says the gaps are key to maintaining a strong theatrical box office.