French cinema is having a festival moment, but U.S. theatrical distribution tells a different story. At the American French Film Festival, three distributors said the market for subtitled films has contracted sharply even as French titles win awards and attract deep-pocketed buyers.
The box-office reset in two numbers
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amélie” grossed roughly $33 million in the U.S. about 25 years ago. Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” a Palme d’Or winner handled by Neon and also an Oscar winner, earned around $5 million. It was among the most successful French films of the last five years.
That is the specialized market squeeze in one comparison: festival and awards heat no longer guarantees a wide U.S. run.
Fewer screens, more competition
Panelists Robert Aronson of Cohen Media Group, John Gerrans of Strand Releasing and Paul Hudson of Outsider Pictures said arthouse venues are booking more Hollywood product, while others have closed. Even Cohen’s Landmark Theatres circuit does not automatically book its own international releases.
- Amélie: about $33M U.S. domestic; Anatomy of a Fall: about $5M.
- Amazon Prime royalties for indie films fell from 10 cents per hour viewed to half a cent, Hudson said.
- Some New York venues are booked months ahead, so distributors rent screens to launch.
Samuel Goldwyn, whose company released Pathé’s two-part “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo,” is opening “De Gaulle” in key U.S. markets day-and-date with transactional VOD. He said the film “could easily play on 1,000 screens if it were in English,” adding that “the only thing that makes it an arthouse movie is because it’s in a foreign language.”
What this means for entertainment marketers
The payout for foreign-language films is no longer a theatrical revenue story alone. DVD money is largely gone, TV sales have collapsed and streaming deals are shrinking. Distributors are pulling films from Amazon Prime and shifting to Tubi, Roku, Pluto and YouTube, while festivals act as another distribution layer.
Star power still moves a title. Gerrans said Isabelle Huppert’s presence helped Strand book “The Blood Countess”: “We’re able to book it because of her.” But lesser-known stories face blunt responses from exhibitors that a storyline seems “too small.”
For planners, the signal is to treat subtitled films as niche precision buys, not mass theatrical plays: an awards-buzz title may have strong PR value but modest screen reach, and its streaming window may be fragmented across FAST and YouTube rather than premium SVOD.
The next lever: younger cinephiles
Hudson said Letterboxd offers a way to find Gen Z audiences on a small budget. He plans an extended rollout for “Congo Boy” from Black History Month through Juneteenth, even if bookings remain scarce: “I can do five months because nobody’s clamoring for this movie to go onto a subscription service. But I may only get seven bookings.”
That patience, and asking exhibitors before acquiring, is now part of the distribution discipline.
Source: Variety
