With the French box office down for nine consecutive months, local exhibitors are facing their first financial crisis since the pandemic; and one they hadn’t seen coming after a milestone 2024 which positioned France as Europe’s healthiest theatrical market.

In most other countries, that sudden turmoil would have translated into a wave of cinemas shuttering, but in France, where the film industry benefits from a strong support system, the National Film Board (CNC) has come up with a targeted scheme to rescue small- and medium-sized exhibitors.

Under the initiative, which was first outlined during the Congres des Exploitants (an annual convention for French exhibitors) at the end of September, the CNC will provide immediate cash flow to struggling independent operators who are facing liquidity issues or potential bankruptcy. The interesting thing with that plan is that the funds won’t come from the state budget, but rather from a levy on theatrical admissions that the CNC collects from exhibitors and saves up for them. The CNC will therefore be issuing cash advances to exhibitors in need from their savings and unlike with subsidies, those advances will have to be repaid by exhibitors.

Richard Patry, who presides over the National Federation of Cinemas (FNCF) and sits on the board of the Cannes Film Festival, pointed out that time is of the essence for the CNC to enact a rescue plan as many exhibitors are now on the brink of bankruptcy.

“We are in a very difficult period for cinema. I’ve never seen such a long and severe crisis in the many years I’ve worked in this sector,” Patry tells Variety. “Before mid-September, we were in an uninterrupted eight-month period of declining attendance, down 15%. We’re missing between 15 and 20 million viewers.”

He says exhibitors have been alerting the FNCF since July about their situation. “We’ve received testimonies telling us, ‘I can’t do it anymore, I’m not going to make it, I’m at risk of filing for bankruptcy, I’m at risk of going into receivership,’ for months now,” he says.

The most affected are the independent exhibitors who invested heavily in 2019-2020, ahead of the pandemic, when the market was much healthier than it is today, and now find themselves in situations of over-indebtedness.

But even multiplexes have been feeling the pinch. Both Pathé and UGC, which run leading cinema chains in France, have recently welcomed new shareholders, the shipping billionaire Rodolphe Saadé and Canal+ Group (owned by another billionaire, Vincent Bolloré), respectively.

“The fact that they’re investing in cinemas means that they believe in them, but if they are doing so now, it’s also because these big chains were also in difficulty and shared some of same struggles as the independents,” Patry said.

For Comscore France head Eric Marti, the box office drop is mainly connected to the film selection that has failed to lure moviegoers over the summer, with the exception of Universal Pictures’ “How to Train Your Dragon” and Apple’s “F1: The Movie.” Even those performances pale in comparison with last year’s bullish B.O. which was bolstered by a trio of local blockbusters, “A Little Something Extra,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “Beating Hearts.”

“At the end of September, we had about 111 million admissions, that’s a 13% year-on drop on 2024 and is down 18% on 2023,” Marti said.

Patry, meanwhile, argues the box office crisis results from a “perfect storm” of market conditions. Besides the skyrocketing energy costs that have dramatically increased utility bills for exhibitors, he noted the difficulty in enticing back regular filmgoers after the pandemic when theaters were closed for 300 days. While there’s been a recent resurgence in attendance from younger audiences, he says getting older demographics back into theaters has become a challenge.

There’s still hope, however, that the last quarter will revert the downward trend with a bunch of anticipated releases, including U.S. tentpoles such as Disney’s “Zootopia 2″ and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Patry and Marti are also enthused by the promising French releases coming up, including “Dog 51,” Cedric Jimenez‘s dystopian movie from Studiocanal which will even get an IMAX rollout; as well as Jan Kounen’s “Shrinking Man” from UGC; Éric Besnard’s “Jean Valjean” from Studio TF1; and Alexandre Astier’s “Kaamelott Part 2” from SND.