Platforms have changed the way we watch films. AI could now transform their creation. Is the French cultural exception ready to take on this new challenge?
Platforms have revolutionized the way we watch films. Artificial intelligence could soon transform the way they are designed. Is the French cultural exception ready?
For decades, French cinema has been built around a simple conviction: certain works deserve to exist, even when they do not respond solely to the laws of the market.
This is the whole philosophy of French cultural exception. Because cinema is not a product like any other. It is an art. It’s an industry. But above all it is a way of looking at the world and of looking at ourselves.
But this balance is shifting, silently but profoundly.
Artificial intelligence is not the origin. It could become its accelerator.
The center of gravity of cinema has shifted
In just a few years, American platforms have become the main gateways to audiovisual works.
According to the CNC, the French video market now represents nearly 2.9 billion euros, of which more than 86% comes from subscription video on demand. More than six out of ten French people now use a streaming platform.
At the same time, theater attendance is still struggling to sustainably return to its pre-pandemic level.
These figures tell much more than an evolution of uses.
They reflect a shift in power.
Because, in all cultural industries, whoever controls distribution gradually influences creation. This is true in publishing. This is true in music. It’s true in the media.
Why should cinema escape this?
For a long time, distributing a work was essentially an economic matter.
Today we discover that it is also a cultural power.
Whoever decides which works will be seen ultimately influences those which will be produced.
When our way of looking transforms the works
A few months ago, Benoît Magimel said that his own daughter watched certain films… in fast motion.
Others no longer hesitate to comment on a film after having only seen the teaser, a few extracts on social networks or a summary video.
It is neither a question of condemning these new uses nor of giving in to nostalgia.
Each generation invents its relationship with images.
But history shows that a method of distribution always ends up transforming the works it transports.
The novel is not written like a play.
Television doesn’t tell stories like cinema.
Social media doesn’t speak like a book.
Why should platforms escape this rule?
Their mission is not only to distribute works.
Their business model consists of capturing and then retaining our attention.
This logic inevitably exerts pressure towards more immediately accessible stories, more frequent twists and turns, more quickly identifiable characters and more explicit emotions.
Of course, many works produced for platforms demonstrate the opposite.
But this tension exists.
Martin Scorsese regrets that cinema is gradually being reduced to content, one content among others in a continuous flow.
Christopher Nolan reminds us that a film should never become a simple asset intended to enrich a catalog.
Denis Villeneuve defends, for his part, an experience which supposes an availability of the mind, countering the permanent fragmentation of our attention.
Everyone is basically talking about the same thing.
Cinema is no longer just facing a technological revolution.
He is facing an attention revolution.
Artificial intelligence could transform the grammar of cinema
The platforms already have extremely detailed knowledge of our behavior.
They know where we interrupt a film, which scenes we rewatch, which characters we are attached to, when we abandon a series.
Artificial intelligence does not create this knowledge.
It gives it unprecedented power.
It allows you to transform this data into creative recommendations: shorten a still shot, remove silence, make something unsaid explicit, speed up a dialogue, reinforce a twist, alleviate an ambiguity or modify an open ending.
The risk is therefore not so much that of a cinema written by algorithms.
It is that of a cinema progressively optimized by them.
When KPIs replace understanding
This development reminds me of another revolution I’ve observed during my career in technology.
For a long time, marketing was all about understanding human beings.
The arrival of digital technology has made it possible to measure everything: clicks, conversions, engagement, time spent.
These indicators have become essential.
But some organizations have ended up confusing measurement with understanding.
Cinema could experience the same drift.
Emotion would become a KPI.
The scenario, a succession of optimizations.
And the author, the interpreter of dashboards.
Cinema was never intended to build customer loyalty
The mission of a platform is perfectly legitimate: to acquire subscribers, retain them and maximize the time spent on its service.
Cinema pursues another ambition.
It offers us a unique perspective on the world.
It makes us love a character that we judged, understand a reality that was foreign to us, accept doubt, discover nuance, hear what the silences reveal as much as the dialogues.
In other words, he doesn’t just want to keep our attention.
He seeks to transform our outlook.
This is how it shapes, often without our knowledge, our emotional intelligence, our empathy, our humor and our relationship to human complexity.
From the moment the acquisition and retention of subscribers becomes the primary criterion for a work, something profoundly changes.
We are no longer entirely in an artistic logic.
We are entering into a logic of optimization.
The French cultural exception faces its next challenge
For more than sixty years, France has built a unique model of cinema financing.
Because the distribution of works fuels their financing, part of the value created is reinvested in new films, including the most demanding.
This model has allowed French cinema to remain one of the most creative and influential in the world.
But what will happen if the main broadcast channels tomorrow meet criteria defined outside Europe?
If the visibility of a work depends mainly on algorithms designed to maximize engagement?
If, gradually, the stories offered to us converge towards the same narrative standards?
The question is no longer just economic.
It is cultural.
And, deep down, deeply political.
We talk a lot about digital sovereignty.
We are debating industrial sovereignty.
We are investing in artificial intelligence.
Perhaps it is time to also talk about cultural sovereignty.
Because a nation does not only lose part of its independence when it gives up control of its technologies.
She also begins to lose it when she no longer controls the stories that shape her collective imagination.
A civilization is defined as much by the stories it tells as by the technologies it invents.
At a time when artificial intelligence is entering all dimensions of our lives, the real question is perhaps not whether it will replace artists.
The real question is who will decide tomorrow the stories that will shape our view of the world.
