French Drama: In Search of a North Star

This past April 14, I opened the Rencontres de la Nouvelle Fiction Française, organized by Media Faculty at EICAR, with a paradox: our drama dominates its domestic rankings as never before, and its business model has never been so fragile. Six weeks of publication and a wave of global consolidation later, that paradox has turned into a documented emergency.

Let's start with the facts

French drama produced its second-highest volume on record in 2024, with 1.2 billion euros invested. It holds 100% of the Top 100 national audiences. It has been France's leading audiovisual export genre for three years. No industry in crisis posts figures like these.

And yet every pillar of its financing is receding at once, which is unprecedented. Broadcasters now cover only 58.8% of budgets. Producers self-finance to the tune of 258 million euros. Exports to the United States have dropped 60% in twenty-four months. And in a scissors effect, the average hourly cost rose from 959,000 euros in 2012 to 1.2 million in 2021, according to Arcom and the CNC, a 25% increase for the same ambition. French drama produces more, costs more, and finances less and less of itself.

While we debate these balances, the world has reorganized itself. In six weeks: the Paramount-Warner merger approved by the Department of Justice at 111 billion dollars, creating an entity of 15,000 titles and nearly 200 million subscribers. Fox's buyout of Roku for 22 billion, a television group that buys neither studio nor catalog, but a pipe to 100 million households and the data that comes with it. The Banijay-All3Media merger at 8 billion. Three deals, a single logic: the battle is no longer fought over content, it is fought over control of distribution and the exploitation of assets.

Four levers, none of them theoretical

The first is the IP Factory: turning a drama into a reproducible, adaptable asset that stays profitable over the long term. Call My Agent! is the French demonstration of it, British, Korean, Italian, Indian and Indonesian versions, and now a global film for Netflix, ten years after the original creation on France 2. The question is not talent: Lupin was the first non-English-language series to pass 70 million households on Netflix in a month, Engrenages sold into 120 countries. The question is the model: a catalog is not an asset because it exists, but because it is activated.

The second is the European alliance. In March, nine countries signed a co-production agreement at Series Mania, amid near-general indifference. Yet it is the only structural move on the scale of Anglo-Saxon consolidation. The French paradox: we have the IP, the know-how and the natural co-financiers (ARTE, ZDF, RAI), but our reflex remains to package for a national broadcaster, even if it means cobbling together the export afterward. In a true alliance, export is not an option, it is the premise.

The third is catalog rent. Content libraries are now valued like investment funds, it is even one of the drivers of the Paramount-Warner merger. The irony: Europe's best catalog manager is French. StudioCanal runs 6,000 titles like a financial asset, with each secondary right and each territorial license forming a revenue line. The real question is not the know-how, it is why this remains a French exception rather than a standard. Three immediate levers exist: revaluing undervalued international rights, transmedia exploitation, format licensing.

The fourth is the industrialization of processes. Season 2 of a French series costs almost as much as Season 1, because each season is, legally and industrially, a new project, a change of director, renegotiated contracts, preparation re-billed. And yet the counter-example exists here at home: Le Bureau des Légendes, five seasons and fifty episodes steered by a single showrunner, a writers' room delivering one season a year, all the way to the International Emmy. But the model's cost of entry, development ten times more expensive, financed even before the broadcaster signs, says it all: showrunning is not culturally impossible in France, it is structurally discouraged. We do not pay more to do better. We pay more to start over.

The systemic cause

There remains the cause that explains why these four levers stay underexploited. When a drama is pre-financed at 60-70% before the first day of shooting, the producer's economic equation is settled upstream, close it out, deliver, move on to the next project. The French system has built a remarkable financing security, one that protects creation. But that same security removes accountability for long-term value: you optimize what you are obliged to optimize.

This is why no lever will suffice without what is missing most: a North Star. Not a survival strategy cobbled together under pressure from broadcasters, an editorial and economic ambition formulated before constraint dictates the choices. I have spent thirty years watching media organizations navigate deep transformations, from Canal+ to Paramount. The constant is simple: those who come through are not necessarily the best-financed. They are the ones who know why they produce.

The complete series "French Drama: In Search of a North Star" (six episodes, June-July 2026) is available on LinkedIn.