Introduction. Broken Hollywood, Fragmented Europe

On the surface, the global film market is doing
well: according to the most recent MPAA
report, the number of cinema screens worldwide
has increased by 6% to over 142 000 and the
global box office is up by 1.4% to USD 36.4 billion,
a rise of 15% over five years. Global film
production increased by 2.5% to an estimated
total of over 6 500 films produced in 2014 with
the EU contributing over 1 600 feature films.
These few positive indicators cannot hide the
concerns of the professional world, which run so
deep that the American magazine Variety recently
ran a feature under the title Broken Hollywood, in
which 22 of the top audiovisual executives in the
United States expressed their fears about the future
of an industry in which the structural upheavals
are considered more serious and worrying than
ever. The global box office may be up but the
number of attendances in the United States and
receipts on the North American market are down.
The typical filmgoer now only buys an average of
5.5 tickets a years, compared with 5.9 in 2013. The
average attendances of filmgoers over forty years
of age rose but those of younger age groups fell.
This drop in attendances in the United States was
accompanied by a decline in the audiences of the
networks and the cable channels and the exhaustion
of the physical video market. Online audiovisual
consumption, whether advertising-financed
services, pay-per-view VoD or sub scription VoD
(not to mention video piracy, which strikes at the
heart of the most costly projects), has become
the dominant practice and poses a challenge to
all the principal balancing factors in the system