# Innovation strategies of independent Parisian Cinemas in the post-pandemic, platformized media environment

Kira Kitsopanidou

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ccc/418
DOI: 10.4000/14ejc
ISSN: 2780-0288

**Publisher**

Université Paris VIII

**Electronic reference**

Kira Kitsopanidou, "Innovation strategies of independent Parisian Cinemas in the post-pandemic, platformized media environment", *Création collective au cinéma* [Online], 7 | 2023, Online since 01 February 2023, connection on 14 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ccc/418 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14ejc

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
Innovation strategies
of independent Parisian Cinemas in the post-pandemic,
platformized media environment

par Kira Kitsopanidou

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

During the Covid-19 health crisis in 2020-2021, cinemas in France were shut, for the first time in history, for a total of 300 days with outright closures running from March to June 2020 and then from October to May 2021, after a brief reprieve over the summer 2021 when cinemas re-opened but with 25-30 percent of the usual number of customers. Cinemas remained under health restrictions till the first half of 2022. The introduction of the vaccine passport led to a sharp drop of attendance (more than 70 % on the day that the measure was introduced), as half of France's population, especially young people, were not yet vaccinated. The controversial health pass and mask-wearing obligations were finally lifted on March 14, 2022. With 152 million admissions in 2022, France's movie theaters have returned to nearly three quarters of their pre-Covid attendance (in 2019, attendance hovered at 213,2 million admissions). It is undeniable that government aid in France reached an unprecedented level to help the industry remain in business. Almost 350 million euros were spent in direct aid. For cinemas around the country, this meant accelerated payment of the Art & Essai subsidies for the nation's 1 200 listed art-house cinemas, suspension, then cancellation, of the theater tax (TSA), rapid adoption of measures to allow operators to mobilize their support funds early, mobilization of the partial unemployment mechanism, direct tax remittances, launching of solidarity funds to cover box-office losses and help theaters stay afloat and measures to encourage the release of new pictures in theaters during the first re-opening in July 2020.

One of the first temporary measures, however, taken by the national cinema body which sparked controversy among theater owners was the shortening of the VOD windows for films on release as cinemas across the country were going into a lockdown mode. Theater owners feared that the measure run the risk of further damaging their business model as it would strengthen competition from streamers. If the figures of attendance in 2021 and mostly
in 2022 now show that French audiences returned to the movies faster than their European neighbors, the years 2020-2021 were nonetheless watershed moments for the acceleration of the process of industry disruption by OTT platforms worldwide. If the pandemic is probably not, in itself, a historic rupture, the realities of this crisis have amplified existing forces acting upon French film exhibition: oversupply of releases due to locally produced or subsidized movies, competition for attention (which now changes scale), market polarization reaching the highest level of the last decade (with concentration on the top 10 movies of the box office being stronger than twenty years ago) and decreasing screen longevity for the majority of the releases. At the same time, the film exhibition business has been confronted to declining average seat occupancy rates in theaters (from 15 % in 2015 to nearly 10 % in 2022), shrinking of theatrical windows and weakening of the exhibitors' cultural prescription power and authority in the new attention economy of algorithmic mediation of cultural consumption boosted by digitalization and the platform economy.

VOD services have taken up, transformed and adapted since their implementation in what Christel Taillibert calls “the cinephile system” the constitutive elements of cinephile mediation. Taillibert notes that the “cinephile system” has opened itself to new digital modes of encounter between the audience and film which questions the ideals (collective projection, the big screen, continuous vision, darkness and silence, etc.) and the invariants (the presence of a human intermediary acting as a third mediator) on which the model of cinephile mediation has since recently been based<fnref n="1" />. While the effects of government-mandated closures and restrictions did not equally impact exhibitors around the country (major multiplex operators being affected by the shortage of high-end productions both national and international during the reopening), the future of film exhibition defined by both physical (and national) location and physical structure was indisputably the major issue in the professional debates during the lock down and during the period following the lifting of all restrictions.

In this chapter, we would like to focus our analysis on some of the concrete results of the French public policies during the Covid and post-Covid era in their effort to address the major challenges of digitalization and platformization facing the film exhibition sector, drawing examples from an empirical study conducted between 2020 and 2022, in collaboration with Erwin Haye, on the Parisian independent exhibition sector. Our analysis will also allow to draw attention to a more entrepreneurial and younger group of

<footnote n="1">¹ Christel Taillibert, *Vidéo à la demande : une nouvelle médiation ? Réflexions autour des plateformes cinéphiles françaises*, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2020, p. 36.</footnote>
individuals aspiring to a career in the movie exhibition industry, who has
grown up with the Internet, smartphones and digital media and has adopted a
more multidisciplinary, cross-industry approach to defining the future of the
independent, art-house cinema business. After describing how the pandemics
accelerated and amplified trends in film exhibition and consumption that
were already underway challenging the experience of cinema "as a product
of historically specific spatial practices of located social interaction"<fnref n="2" /> and
encouraging the implementation of new public-policy tools directed towards
innovation, we will focus on the art-house branch of the exhibition
marketplace in order to discuss some strategies aiming at introducing new
dynamics of audience engagement and cinematic experience.

Redefining the movie experience in the post-Covid era

According to Motion Picture Association (MPA) report in 2022, home entertainment accounted for 79% of the almost 100 billion worldwide video entertainment industry in 2021, digital entertainment exceeding threefold the box office worldwide. The significant substitution between streaming services and cinemas was also underlined by two French studies released in May 2022, the first commissioned from France's National Cinema Centre - CNC ("Why are the French going less to the cinema"), the second by the market research group IFOP for the French Association of Art Cinemas - AFCAE ("Films and series on streaming platforms"). When asked why they had been going to cinema less than before the pandemic, one third of the respondents in the CNC study tended to answer that it was because they had fallen out of the habit (38 %) and a quarter of them that they preferred watching cinema on other platforms. For the 15-34-year demographic, the substitution effect was particularly strong, whereas for the older 60 + generation loss of habit was among top reasons for not going to the movies. The percentage of SVOD clients declaring going less to the movies than before the pandemic even mounted to 41 % in the AFCAE/IFOP study suggesting that streaming (and mainly the home-viewing of series by the 15-24-year demographic) had become a serious competitor to cinema attendance. Since these studies are measuring audiences' intentions in a declarative way, the results must be handled with precaution. However, the CNC's yearly statistical study on film audiences in 2023 reports a greater penetration of VOD services among

<footnote n="2">² Lies Van de Vijver, “Why young People Still Go to the Movies”, in Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, Philippe Meers (ed.), *The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History*, New York, Routledge, 2019, p. 378.</footnote>
younger cohorts, in particular the 15-34-year demographic, supporting the
thesis of a significant change in viewing habits. While attracting young
audiences has been a constant preoccupation for the art-house sector as the
15-24 demographic has been shifting to digital culture even before the Covid
crisis, the post-pandemic era heightened anxieties around the place of cinema
in the age of streaming and reinforced policy makers' focus (in France, as well
as in Europe) on audience development.

When Netflix announced holding a festival in several art cinemas in December 2021 with some of the best productions of the moment streaming on the platform including Sorrentino's *The Hand of God*, Campion's *The Power of the Dog* or Adam McKay's *Don't Look Up* starring DiCaprio, in the midst of the negotiations on media chronology with streamers and broadcasters, the French exhibitors and distributors responded with outrage. Despite of the festival being reduced to a "Netflix Film Club" shown at the Cinémathèque française in Paris and the Institut Lumière in Lyon, the controversy raged in the public sphere with exhibitors denouncing Netflix's event as an attempt to further blurring the lines between broadcasting and exhibiting a movie, while benefiting from the gate-keeping functions of film exhibition in terms of attention management. Furthermore, the French exhibitor's post-lock down defense towards the new digital players "institutional logic"<fnref n="3" /> borrowed to some extent from sovereignty rhetoric, which has evolved into a discursive practice in contemporary public cultural and digital policies: "Combined with the private sector which is still 100 % owned by French capital, cinemas in France offer more diversity than any transnational digital platform today" argued Richard Patry, head of the National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF) during the second lockdown in 2021⁴. The reaction of film distributors also illustrates the widely shared perception of the streamers growing interest in the theatrical exhibition business as an opportunist move aiming at boosting those titles by taking advantage of the deeply rooted symbolic meaning of the big screen experience as a specific spatial and socio-cultural construction, while continuously undermining their cultural prescription power and the business model of theatrical distribution as a whole.

<footnote n="3">³ Allègre L. Hadida, Joseph Lampel, W. David Walls and Amit Joshi, "Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: a tale of two institutional logics", *Journal of Cultural Economics*, n° 45, 2021, p. 213-238.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ “Quelle(s) démarche(s) d’innovation pour les salles de cinéma en période de Covid”, table ronde organisée le 8 mars 2021 par Kira Kitsopanidou et Laurent Creton lors du webinaire de l’UFR Arts & Médias de la Sorbonne Nouvelle “Une nouvelle normalité pour la culture, les médias et la communication?” (6ᵉ édition de la Semaine des Arts et Médias, UFR Arts & Médias, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, mars 2021. Dernière consultation le 22 octobre 2023. [En ligne]. URL : https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=wUSosLl9R60).</footnote>
The necessity of reviewing existing assumptions and conceptions about the
spatial-temporal dimensions of the post-digital conversion theatrical
distribution model has also been pointed out by the art-house branch of the
exhibition marketplace. As François Aymé, former president of the French
Association of Art Cinemas (AFCAE), suggested in an interview in March
2021, the quantitative operating model of contemporary film exhibition
dictated by major circuits and resulting from the growing number of cinemas,
as well as proliferation of a movie's showings throughout the day enter in
contradiction with the audience's strong expectation regarding the movie
theater as a public space bringing together as many people as possible to live
the experience of watching movies together. The collective value of each
screening decreases as the theatrical release expands, adding more theaters and
screens. Questioning the effectiveness of such “volume” strategies, Aymé asks:
“do we really need to have 5 screenings of the same movie in a single day in a
town with a population of less than 10 000 inhabitants<fnref n="5" />?” If big screens,
comfortable seats, exclusivity and diversity of the programming, and, more
generally, cinemagoing as a “certain type of socialized experience<fnref n="6" />” are still of
relevance in the new post-Covid context, they are not sufficient arguments to
defend film exhibition. Its future will organically and primarily depend on the
exhibitors’ capacity to keep forging connections between the cinema and the
spectator beyond the movie itself, through cultural mediation, interaction and
audience participation. As suggested by Elisa Ravazzoli, cinemagoing is a
“geographically situated experience” which is “continually produced,
reconstructed and reconfigured” by the different times and places in which it
occurs. Independent exhibitors in France had not, till recently, sufficiently
taken advantage of the architectural features of the movie theatre as means to
influence the psychological, spatial and physical experience of the screening.
Building “atmospheres” through interior design and decorative elements, along
with eventization and personalization, is becoming “essential to the business”<fnref n="8" />.

The “Innovation Prize” set up since 2016 by the CNC to “reward those
who put at the heart of their action the permanent modernization of their
theaters, whether in terms of architecture, programming, animation and

<footnote n="5">⁵ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ David Morley, *Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies*, New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 158.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Eliza Ravazzoli, “Cinema going as Spatially Contextualised Cultural and Social Practice”, *Alphaville, Journal of Film and Screen Media*, n° 11, summer 2016, p. 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ François Aymé, “Quelle(s) démarche(s) d’innovation pour les salles de cinéma en période de Covid”, *op. cit.*</footnote>
engaging with the audience<fnref n="9" />" is an interesting example of how public film policies in France, through the introduction of incentives aimed at shaping and promoting an innovation culture and new tools of territorial cultural policies (such as the controversial "Culture Pass"<fnref n="10" />), attempted to address the major challenges of digitalization and reaching out to "tomorrow's audience in all regions". Some of examples we will be discussing in the following pages are closely associated either with the CNC's open call for projects encouraging new practices and actions of cultural diffusion to the younger audiences or with the Futur@Cinema program developed in partnership with several festivals and residences, launched at the Arcs Film Festival in 2021, with the purpose of winning back the 15-25-year demographic whose cultural consumption has moved online and to digital modes of delivery. Such measures encouraging youth engagement, a particular concern for European Film, absorb up to 20% of Europa Cinemas incentives. Muck like the CICAE mentoring program for the new generation of European arthouse managers or Europa Cinemas' recent program "Collaborate to Innovate", aiming at accelerating the diffusion of innovative practices across its network<fnref n="11" />, Futur@cinema explores various themes such as the design of spaces or sustainable development, but also marketing or event management, to establish a dynamic of innovation between independent exhibitors in France and to rehabilitate cinema going in the cultural practices of young audiences. The project also seeks to create a wider network of experimentation and to support the emergence of structuring practices and projects for the industry and the exhibition sector in particular. Among the projects that have been incubated during the two editions of the program, many were initiated by a younger generation of exhibitors and distributors who have grown up with internet access, smartphones and web apps and are more willing to adapt to changing consumer realities and experiment with digital technologies and digital media to redefine how cinemas interact with their audiences. The growing professionalization of the professions of film bookers, programmers and cinema managers since the 2000s following the emergence of specialized

<footnote n="9">⁹ CNC Press release, September 28, 2016. Last consulted October 22, 2023. [Online]. URL: https://www.cnc.fr/cinema/communiques-de-presse/premier-prix-recompensante-une-salle-de-cinema-le-prix-de-la-salle-innovante_107260.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Culture Pass was designed by the French government to promote "knowledge of and access to cultural offerings" to all 18-year-olds across the country, giving them 300 euros to spend on music, theatre, cinema, museums, books, works of art, etc. It has been criticized as a top down initiative and for promoting consumerism favoring mainstream media such as Hollywood blockbusters.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ The program's ambition is to encourage the sharing and circulation of best practices across the network as well as to promote incubation and testing of innovations which could later be shared across the group of cinemas.</footnote>
professional courses and training programs (ex. Distribution/Cinema Management course initiated in 2003 at The Fémis film school) has indeed played a decisive role in developing adaptability to changing environments and work processes and shaping a new generation of professionals<fnref n="12" />.

## Exhibitors as creative entrepreneurs with cross-industry approach to innovation

The idea of innovation labs where young exhibitors could share and test ideas and local practices predates the pandemic<fnref n="13" />. The National Federation of French Cinemas (FNCF) launched back in 2013 a “Young exhibitors Reflection Committee” as a pool of young professionals under the age of 35 with the aim to encourage involvement and training in militant action within the FNCF, through the emergence of new ideas and new ways of addressing issues of general interest to the theater business. While the French exhibitors lobbying body was quick to recognize that a younger generation of theater managers could help revamp what Ann Vogel defines as the classical format of theatrical exhibition fostered in public events formats typical of the last century<fnref n="14" />, it was the Independent Parisian Cinema Association (CIP) founded in 1992 who best captured and voiced the desire of many professionals of the independent art house sector under the age of 35 for empowerment, more collaborative, decentralized and community-based practices and an “augmented” or “enriched” cinema (meaning cinemas being “more than cinemas”), inventing not only new opportunities for interaction with the younger audiences through innovative programming techniques and a pluridisciplinary approach to immersion, but also playing a significant role in supporting local creative or alternative cultural ecosystems. Agnès Salson, editor of a report for the CNC on emerging trends in film exhibition in Europe in 2016 and co-funder of the Forêt Électrique, an alternative cinema at

<footnote n="12">¹² We may formulate the hypothesis that the joint effect of generational renewal and professionalization of these professions will ultimately influence professional belief systems, inclination to innovate and general way of doing things.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ More generally, the emergence of cultural innovation labs and collaborative platforms as organizational catalysts to innovation in the cultural and creative industries predates the pandemic. See for instance the “Culture Lab” initiated in 2010 by the French Ministry of Culture and “Entreprendre dans la culture” platform developed by the culture entrepreneurship association MERCI – Undertaking in the Culture and innovation Networks Mission for the French Ministry of Culture and its General Directorate for Media and the Cultural Industries (DGMIC) in 2015.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Ann Vogel, *Festivalization of Capitalism. The Experience-Makers*, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2023, p. 80.</footnote>
Toulouse in France, resumes this generation's ambitions as follows: “The enriched theater is intended to be a model that fully integrates into the new digital ecosystem: through the dissemination of new content, the establishment of new spaces and the extension of the role of the spectator, taking into account the ever-increasing importance of fragmented practices and the collaborative phenomenon on the Internet, while continuing the work of local cinemas where watching a movie on a big screen remains at the heart of the cinemagoing experience<fnref n="15" />”.

One of the initiatives launched by the independent, art-house branch of French film exhibition sector that illustrates how the pandemic and post-pandemic era have challenged or shaped the meaning of cinemagoing as a spatial, cultural and societal process is the CIP's Open Screen Club launched as part of the CIP innovation laboratory initiated in 2021 and following the French CNC call's for projects aiming to attract younger audiences to theaters. The idea is a transposition of the “Open Mic nights” to the cinema. Young talents are invited to propose but also to discover in a festive atmosphere of exchange and sharing his/her movies, videos, sound works or digital content, the whole event being accompanied by impactful digital communication. Since the first season, at least 18 sessions were held with an average audience of 100 spectators. In 2022, the MK2 circuit in Paris led an experiment with the YouTube Club Sympa Cool. Following this event, MK2 and YouTube France recently announced the launching of a ciné-club whose ambition will be to showcase cult YouTube videos for young audiences and even organize previews for videos which are highly anticipated by subscribers, as was recently the case in Paris for Sébastien Frit's latest documentary, *SEB au Kirghizistan*. A series of 6 screenings, each accompanied by a YouTube talent or critic, have already been announced for 2024. MK2's CEO described the event as an opportunity for two cultural industries to converge around the young audiences' appetite for original and exclusive content.

In the recent years, YouTube film critics and reviewers as well as creators have evolved into being key players of the cinephile system, pursuing mediation strategies in continuation with “traditional cinephile system” as defined by Taillibert, which, while supported by the CNC, has been in crisis due to aging audiences and digital platforms' successful strategies in drawing large amounts of younger audiences' attention. The Internet, not film exhibition nor film broadcasting on television, is thus being regarded as a privileged field of action for cultural policy in France with the potential of reaching younger audiences and rallying them to the cinephile culture. Online

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Agnès Salson, *La Salle de cinéma enrichie : un cinéma de proximité à l'heure de la société connectée*, final year dissertation under the supervision of Kira Kitsopanidou, La Fémis, 2015, p. 65.</footnote>
platforms fostering creative spaces, augmented reality (AR) and interconnected virtual communities have become synonymous with innovation and are being promoted as the era of near-limitless boundaries for creativity and entertainment experiences.

## Cinemas as a “platform”

The second example of our empirical research offers an illustration of how cinemas during the confinement period further entered the digital territories of new media, even becoming something like a platform. In 2020, during the first lock down in France, French firm, La 25ème Heure, launched a digitalized virtual movie theater as a substitute to physical screenings which couldn't take place. The idea was to reproduce as closely as possible the conditions in which movies are programmed and screened to the audience in the physical world, proposing scheduled movie sessions with exhibitors in a geo-localized area, so that this perimeter (reproducing the catchment areas of cinemas participating in the virtual showing) allows them to work with their usual audience, even organize panel discussions or Q&A sessions with the creatives after the movies. As Pierre-Emmanuel Le Goff, 25ème Heure's CEO, notes: “We're closer to a normal movie session, except that the venue is virtual, because there aren't really four walls and it's hosted in the cloud<fnref n="16" />”. The technology also enables multiple sites, both virtual and physical, to connect, extending a screening's reach beyond the movie theater, to other theaters or cultural venues. The virtual audiences can react to the performance through live chat box's, live video and emojis. Le Goff argues that the virtual cinema sessions, which are different from vod services, allow cinemas to reach a wider and more diverse audience, from digital natives who consume entertainment essentially online to disabled audiences, thus expanding their missions. Almost 500 hundred cinemas and 120 festivals have used the platform to date which is now commercialized under the brand “Cuult”.

For Le Goff the virtual cinema platform is first and foremost a digital prosthesis to the movie theater as “a physical site of spatial exchange”<fnref n="17" />”. However, the idea of cinema as a platform (the term being used here in a more

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ “Innovations et solutions numériques : la clé de la résilience pour les cinémas ?”, Forum Entreprendre dans la culture, September 28, 2021, roundtable moderated by Anne Pouliquen (Futur@Cinema). Last consulted October 22, 2023. [Online]. URL : https://forumentreprendculture.culture.gouv.fr/retransmissions-des-editions-precedentes/retransmissions-2021/mardi-28-septembre-2021/28-09-17h15-innovation-solutions-numeriques-pour-le-cinema</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ “Cinema going as Spatially Contextualised Cultural and Social Practice”, op. cit., p. 39.</footnote>
expansive way) is not entirely associated with the way the pandemic challenged the idea of a live audience. As Blake Hallinan and C. J. Reynolds argue, AR integration, apps that deliver personalized advertising to moviegoers within the physical space of movie theaters, digital point-of-sale systems and activity-tracking loyalty programs and their associated on-demand experiences, websites and social media accounts have already disrupted the conventions of movie theater operation, turned the theatrical audience into digitized media users and theaters into something near to a platform: “Compared to streaming video on demand services like Netflix, the traditional movie theater may seem a difficult and restrictive sort of platform” but “despite these material limitations, movie theaters have sought to offer something akin to on-demand access using an assortment of different strategies. As a result, going to the movie theater becomes only one way in which company and customer can interact, instead of the exclusive way to do so<fnref n="18" />”. The virtual movie theater platform can thus be analyzed as a further step in the digitization of the theatrical audience and, more generally, in the evolution of the theater as a “communication technology” to borrow Kevin J. Corbett’s definition<fnref n="19" />, where components of design, cinema technology, lobby operations and audience activity are analyzed as a functionally whole<fnref n="20" />.

Pushing even further the idea of platformization, Vincent Tessier, CEO of One Digital Nation, founder of CinéVR, argues: “Today, we will be able to create hybrid events. We have cinemas, virtual movie theaters, we can go one step further by saying that we can go into a totally virtual cinema and target audiences who will not be physically present, who are used to these metaverses virtual worlds in which they will live the collective cinematic experience with all the associated conventions and rituals, as in the case of the French CinéVR platform, a 3D cinema simulation which can be accessed individually or collectively (with other users that join the platform in the form of avatars) to live the experience of the big screen on one’s private couch with a catalog of feature films and 360 content<fnref n="21" />”. Besides the “cinema experience” aspect, CinéVR offers themed and custom-made rooms (ex. a haunted house for a horror film) exploiting marketing personalization strategies typical of the new media economy.

<footnote n="18">18 Blake Hallinan and C. J. Reynolds, “New Media Goes to the Movies: Digitizing the Theatrical Audience”, *Television & New Media*, 2019, vol. 22(4), p. 383-384.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Kevin J. Corbitt, “The Big Picture: Theatrical Moviegoing, Digital Television, and beyond the Substitution Effect”, *Cinema Journal*, vol. 40, n° 2, winter 2001, p. 17-34.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Charles R. Acland, *Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture*, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 57.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 “Innovations et solutions numériques, la clé de la résilience pour les cinémas ?”, op. cit.</footnote>
A “transmedia” approach to the traditional movie theater
experience

The last example of our study, *The Imperceptible Film Festival*, illustrates the way independent exhibitors experiment with new media and digital technologies to build around the traditional theatrical screening format a playfully motivating and engaging social experience which will potentially add value to cinema releases for the younger audiences without transforming established conventions of movie theater operation. “Imperceptibles” is based on secret cinema sessions: to integrate the community and participate in the event, the audience must find the clues dispersed through an urban circuit in the city of Paris (and Budapest) which unlock a phone-based game in augmented reality. Once all of the riddles resolved, the audience has access to the programming (previews, heritage movies, cult movies), list of participating cinemas and point-of-sales system to buy tickets for the secret screenings. The identity of the film remains confidential until the evening of the screening. The project, conceived by Alix Menard, head of the CIP Lab and head of development at the Étoile Cinemas independent circuit in Paris, received support from the French CNC and was incubated during the 2021 edition of Futur@Cinema where it won the Jury award. However, since its launch, the project has faced the challenge (common to other projects whose incubation has been financed by public subsidies) of raising additional financial resources in order to improving the concept, developing its market and assuring its sustainability.

Conclusion

Major circuits and independent cinemas (mostly in Paris and big urban
centers) are engaging their theatrical business into new strategies that have
been challenging and progressively transforming the standard theatrical
exhibition format since the early 2010s. On the one hand, major circuits, such
as Pathé-Gaumont cinemas, invest in enhanced sound experiences, haptic
movement technology and 4K laser projections on giant screens to deliver
greater theatrical experiences that singularize and eventize the flow of
globalized audiovisual productions and, at the same time, work on the
operationalization, in the context of theatrical exhibition, of the new media
qualities of personalization and on-demand access to develop their audiences.
Independent art cinema exhibitors (and smaller circuits), on the other hand,
encouraged by public incentives on a national and European level aiming at
accelerating innovation in the cultural and creative industries, are experimenting with a wider range of strategies, some of which are clearly orientated towards an innovative use of digital media, in order to deepen the engagement of audiences, strengthen their role of cultural intermediaries as well as the social relevance of the local movie theater in the new platformized media environment. The economic efficiency, however, of such innovative initiatives in terms of investment, conditions of replicability, market diffusability and sustainability in a context of rapid global social, cultural and marketplace changes, remains to be seen.

While the strategic responses of the movie exhibition in France to the challenges of digitalization, platformization and data-driven management depend on the type, size and business model of each exhibition company, these strategies end up redefining how cinemas interact, connect and relate to their audiences and how they seek to capitalize or extract value from establishing, expanding and strengthening the quality of these connections, both in the physical and digital world. Further qualitative research is, however, needed to establish audience's perception and experiences of such innovative proposals and their actual cultural resonance. The purpose of this chapter was mainly to discuss the exhibitors logics of action in response to the challenges of film exhibition and audience attention.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

## References List

* "Innovations et solutions numériques : la clé de la résilience pour les cinémas ?", Forum Entreprendre dans la culture, September 28, 2021, round table moderated by Anne Pouliquen (Futur@Cinema). Last consultated October 22, 2023. [Online].

URL: https://forumentreprendreculture.culture.gouv.fr/retransmissions-des-editions-precedentes/retransmissions-2021/mardi-28-septembre-2021/28-09-17h15-innovation-solutions-numeriques-pour-le-cinema.

* ACLAND Charles R., *Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture*, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.

* CORBITT Kevin J., "The Big Picture: Theatrical Moviegoing, Digital Television, and beyond the Substitution Effect", *Cinema Journal*, vol. 40, n° 2, winter 2001, p. 17-34.
HADIDA Allègre L., LAMPEL Joseph, WALLS W. David and JOSHI Amit, “Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: a tale of two institutional logics”, *Journal of Cultural Economics*, n° 45, 2021.

HALLINAN Blake, C. J. Reynolds, “New Media Goes to the Movies: Digitizing the Theatrical Audience”, *Television & New Media*, 2019, vol. 22, n° 4, 2019.

MORLEY David, *Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies*, New York, Routledge, 1992.

RAVAZZOLI Eliza, “Cinemagoing as Spatially Contextualised Cultural and Social Practice”, *Alphaville, Journal of Film and Screen Media*, n° 11, summer 2016.

SALSON Agnès, *La salle de cinéma enrichie : un cinéma de proximité à l'heure de la société connectée*, final year dissertation under the supervision of Kira Kitsopanidou, La Fémis, 2015.

TAILLIBERT Christel, *Vidéo à la demande : une nouvelle médiation ? Réflexions autour des plateformes cinéphiles françaises*, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2020.

VAN DE VIJVER Lies, “Why young People Still Go to the Movies”, in Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, Philippe Meers (ed.), *The Rouledge Companion to New Cinema History*, New York, Rouledge, 2019, p. 378-386.

VOGEL Ann, *Festivalization of Capitalism. The Experience-Makers*, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2023.