Depuis que le Streaming Existe?: Gaumont and French Cinema in the Streaming Era

Abstract

Gaumont is the world’s oldest continually operating film studio, and this legacy is so important to the company that it brands its title cards with the slogan ‘Depuis que le cinéma existe’ (‘since cinema has existed’). In recent years, however, Gaumont has diversified into series production while also selling off its movie theatre holdings, all so the company could focus its strategies on producing for the newly emerging streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, while also trying to maintain its presence in French cinema. This chapter analyses the company’s strategic evolution since 2012—when it began diversifying into series—and examines what this shift has meant for Gaumont and French cinema more broadly as streaming services became the most important companies in the global film industry.

To say that the Gaumont Film Company is a fixture in the French cinema landscape would be something of an understatement. The studio has in fact been a constant since the very beginning of the French film industry, and indeed world film history as we know it. As is referenced in its corporate motto—‘depuis que le cinéma existe’ or ‘born with cinema’ in its English-language branding—Gaumont is the world’s longest-running film company, predating Pathé Frères, France’s first corporate superpower in the global film industry, as a registered corporate entity. Since 1895, Gaumont has, with some brief interruptions and occasional changes in corporate strategy, consistently been in the business of making and distributing French films. For significant portions of that time the company also ran cinemas, expanded internationally and produced content for television broadcasters. The dawn of the streaming era—a period in film history that has seen global video-on-demand platforms come to dominate film production and consumption—however, finds Gaumont now at the forefront of global audiovisual production. For the first time in its celebrated history, the company’s reputation is not based on its work in French cinema, but instead its best-known works internationally and arguably in France as well are its series, particularly those made with the subscription video-on-demand (henceforth (S)VoD) service Netflix. Gaumont’s production of the Omar Sy-starring Lupin (Netflix, 2021–) has in some ways become the studio’s (and the star’s) signature work, and as such it joins other internationally famous Gaumont-produced Netflix series such as Barbaren/Barbarians (Netflix, 2020–) and the Narcos franchise (Netflix, 2015–).

While these series are among the most widely watched series on the global service, Gaumont has also remained an important constituent of French cinema, with its films continuing to post significant admissions figures and win César awards.¹ In 2021, for example, as Lupin achieved global notoriety on a scale that few French series (if any) have achieved, Gaumont also released the local box-office hits Adieu les cons/Goodbye Morons (Albert Dupontel, 2020) and OSS 117: alerte rouge en Afrique noire/OSS 117: From Africa with Love (Nicolas Bedos, 2021), as well as Illusions perdues/Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli, 2021), which swept the 2022 César awards. The company has thus become one of the world’s leading producers of television series while remaining a potent force in French cinema. Crucially, the company has been able to achieve all this in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that has adversely affected film and television production around the globe and that dealt a severe blow to the cinema exhibition sector of the industry in particular.

This chapter will seek to explore just how, within approximately a single decade, Gaumont has so profoundly reinvented itself while not missing a beat in its core business of producing and releasing French films. To do so, it will first provide a chronicle of this fateful decade, beginning with the unprecedented success of Intouchables/Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) and the decision in 2012 to launch a new television division, and concluding in the present day as the company finds itself a major player simultaneously in global television and French cinema. With this chronology established, and working from a theorisation of the role of producers such as Gaumont as ‘intermediaries’ of various kinds, the chapter will then turn to highlighting the key creative and corporate relationships that the company has formed during this period, particularly with creative partners such as stars and directors on one hand and buyers/financiers, particularly (S)VoD platforms such as Netflix, but also later with Amazon and other important global platforms such as Disney+ and Paramount+, on the other. Along the way, this exploration will also allow us to appreciate how Gaumont’s collaborations have affected its film output and how the company established a model that its peers in the French industry have tried to follow.

Dumas Takes the Helm: Gaumont Since Intouchables

With its fabled position as the oldest film company in the world, Gaumont has a long history that goes far beyond what can be covered in this chapter. For accounts in English of its role in shaping the earliest days of the global film industry, readers can consult the many fine studies of the period and the role of French studios therein that are found in the field of historiographies of early cinema (see, for instance, Abel 1994; Thompson 1984, and others). Suffice it to say that Gaumont has produced a significant proportion of France’s film patrimony—including a library of some 1000 feature films, among other holdings—and was for a long time an important exhibitor, with many cinema halls in France to this day bearing its name, even if, as we will see, the company no longer owns them. Instead, the period that this chapter is concerned with begins with the appointment of Sidonie Dumas as CEO in 2010. Up until this point, Dumas had worked in a number of managerial roles, including as chairperson of the board of directors under her father Nicolas Seydoux, who had been the majority shareholder in the studio since the mid-1970s. One of the first major projects released by Gaumont with Dumas as CEO would be Intouchables, which would ultimately gross over $450 million at the international box office and would spawn a number of remakes, including the US film The Upside (Neil Burger, 2017). The broader importance of Intouchables to French cinema hardly needs reiterating here, but it should be noted that among its many legacies, this film would help to reshape Gaumont in numerous ways.

One of these impacts came in the form of the immediate financial windfall that Gaumont reaped from the film’s unprecedented box-office success. Gaumont would go on to report record profits for the 2011 fiscal year, with net income doubling from 2010 to €26 million, with the initial success of Intouchables in French theatres being cited as the primary driver in this growth (Gaumont 2012, 10). These profits would then be utilised by the company to grow its television production business, which at the time was only producing cartoon series and made-for-television movies and documentaries for French broadcasters. At the same time that Gaumont was announcing its 2011 profits, Seydoux revealed that the company would be investing in US television production, calling it a lower-risk and generally more stable business than film production and distribution (in Gaumont 2012, 4). Dumas provided more details about the first major international project it had in development: the American horror series Hemlock Groves (in Gaumont 2012, 6). This series would later be retitled Hemlock Grove and sold to a US (S)VoD company that was taking its first steps as a commissioner of original series, thus becoming one of the first fully-financed original series commissioned by Netflix, alongside famous titles such as House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–2018) and Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–2019).

Hemlock Grove (Netflix, 2013–2015) would run for three seasons on Netflix and was one of three very significant US series produced in the early 2010s by Gaumont. The second of these was the critically acclaimed series Hannibal (NBC/AXN, 2013–2015), which attracted a passionate fanbase and became a cult hit of sorts, despite the low ratings that led to its cancellation by NBC after three seasons. The more significant series for our present purposes, however, would be Narcos (Netflix, 2015–2017), which would become one of Netflix’s most popular original shows at the time of its initial release and would later spawn a sequel series in the form of Narcos: Mexico (Netflix, 2018–2021), which was also produced by Gaumont (Fig. 1). For Gaumont, Narcos helped to consolidate and deepen its relationship with Netflix while also significantly enhancing its visibility and reputation as a producer of international series. Around this time, Gaumont Animation also began producing F is for Family (Netflix, 2015–2021), a series that would ultimately run for five seasons.

Fig. 1

Gaumont produces one of Netflix’s first major global hits, and one of its longest-running franchises, with Narcos

Buoyed by the success of Gaumont’s experiments in international television production, Dumas announced in 2017 that the company would undertake an important transformation by selling off its interest in the Les Cinémas Gaumont Pathé cinema exhibition business. In announcing the deal—which saw Gaumont sell its stake in the company to fellow shareholder Pathé for a reported $400 million—the company said it intended to use the proceeds to invest further in film and television production (Hopewell 2017). Gaumont would then embark on an aggressive expansion of its television operations, growing its animation and French television production subsidiaries and forming partnerships and subsidiaries in Latin America, the UK, Italy and Germany (Gaumont 2022, 11). Crucial to the commercial fortunes of these partnerships and subsidiaries was Gaumont’s relationship with Netflix specifically and the growing content needs of the global (S)VoD platforms generally. Netflix commissions to arise from these increased development activities so far include French series such as the aforementioned Lupin, which became a blockbuster success for the (S)VoD service, as well as docuseries such as Move (Netflix, 2020–), the British series Damage (Netflix, 2022), the German series Barbarians and animated series such as Samurai Rabbit (Netflix, 2022–), among others. These partnerships have also produced series with Amazon (e.g. the Chilean series El presidente/The President [Amazon Prime Video, 2020–], the animated series Do Re & Mi [Amazon Prime Video, 2021–] and the French drama series Totems [Amazon Prime Video, 2021–]), Disney+ (a forthcoming scripted series about Karl Lagerfeld) and at least four series to come for Paramount+ (Vivarelli 2022). The company has also produced the animated series Stillwater (2020–2023) for Apple TV+ and a range of series and made-for-television movies for pay-television and broadcast television channels in France, Germany and the UK.

Gaumont’s television operations have thus turned the company from a film studio producing almost exclusively in France to a multinational producer with operations in seven countries.² To take just one data point that demonstrates this ‘postnational’ position on Gaumont’s part, the company generated about €16 million in revenue outside France in 2011, about 13 per cent of its overall total for that year (Gaumont 2012, 11), whereas in 2021, the company reported that 79 per cent of its revenues came from outside France (Gaumont 2022, 51). Crucially, the latter figure includes television series production, which now makes up the majority of the company’s revenues. To dramatise just how much this part of the company’s business has grown, a comparison with 2011 is once again instructive. In that year, Gaumont reported about €6 million in revenue from the production of television series of various kinds, all of which were made for French television networks (Gaumont 2012, 11), a figure that constituted less than five per cent of its overall revenue. By way of comparison, in 2021 the company generated about €195 million from television production and distribution, approximately 73 per cent of its overall total turnover (Gaumont 2022, 20). While it could be said that 2021 was an anomalous year for the balance of film and television income—French cinemas were closed for about 21 weeks due to the COVID-19 crisis—this reliance on television production was part of a decade-long trend at Gaumont.

Gaumont and French Cinema in the Streaming Era

By 2021 Gaumont was thus more of a television producer than a film producer and distributor; it was also more of an international corporation than a French one. What has this meant for its French cinema business? As was shown at the outset of the chapter, Gaumont’s presence in French cinema has not declined during this period, and indeed the company has consistently released about 10–12 French films annually throughout this period, and among these films there are to be found many critical and commercial successes. How do we reconcile these two seemingly paradoxical facts? Firstly, we should begin by discarding the notion that success in either television or film necessarily precludes success in the other medium/industry. Instead of looking for evidence of a zero-sum game between film and television at Gaumont, we should instead reframe the question so that it is more concerned with understanding the relationship between the company’s activities in the two media. Similarly, against the widespread perception in popular cultural discourses surrounding Netflix and (S)VoD generally that sees the company and streaming generally as threats to the industrial ecosystem of cinema, we should take a more open-minded approach to asking how the growing power of global (S)VoD services has affected Gaumont’s film output.

The remainder of the chapter will seek to take both of these approaches and in the process of doing so, it will focus on two kinds of relationships that Gaumont has formed in this period, one creative and one commercial, that have shaped both its film and television output in the streaming era. This examination of the work of a producer through the lens of relationships grows out of a theoretical understanding of the labour of the producer as fundamentally that of an ‘intermediary’ who mediates between the various agents who create and consume films and series (Spicer et al. 2014). Instead of positing the producer as an authorial figure, this theorisation holds that producers form relationships with partners such as stars, directors and writers as well as other creative agents, while also developing and maintaining relationships with financiers, distributors and other industrial agents. Producer labour is thus concerned with connecting all of these otherwise disparate segments of the film industry and film culture.

To return to Gaumont and its two key relationships, we can begin with the creative relationships that have underpinned the company’s overall output in both media during this period. While Gaumont has developed numerous relationships with directors, producers, writers and other personnel that have been significant in their contemporary work in French cinema, perhaps none has been more visible and important in recent years than the company’s association with star Omar Sy. Sy was of course the breakthrough star of Intouchables and the relationship he then formed with Gaumont marks yet another important legacy of the film, as shortly after it became such a massive hit, Gaumont and Sy began looking for projects on which they could collaborate in the future. One of those was Sy’s idea of rebooting the Arsène Lupin stories in some form or another (Leonard 2021). Developing this idea would take a number of years to accomplish, but in the meantime, Sy would go on to make four more films with Gaumont: starring in Samba (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toldano, 2014)—which reunited Sy with the writer-directors of Intouchables—Chocolat/Monsieur Chocolat (Roschdy Zem, 2016), as well as making a guest appearance as himself in Tout simplement noir/Simply Black (Jean-Pascal Zadi and John Wax, 2020). Later, following closely on the heels of Lupin’s global success, Sy would star in the Gaumont production Tirailleurs/Father and Soldier (Mathieu Vadepied, 2022). While these were all commercially viable propositions due to Sy’s appearance in the films, the projects were very political works that reflected critically on race in contemporary France and French history, with Sy often speaking in interviews promoting the films about the personal dimension these issues and the narratives on the whole had for him as the child of Senegalese immigrants (see, for instance, Keslassy 2021).

We can thus see this partnership as a symbiotic one that helped Gaumont to make numerous critically and commercially successful films, while also producing one of the most important French series of this period. From Sy’s point of view, he was able to leverage this studio relationship in ways that helped to enhance his already considerable international profile while also getting films that were of personal import made. Helping the star in this way also helps Gaumont to keep Sy working on Lupin, which is currently slated for a second season on Netflix, while Gaumont is also developing possible spin-offs for future series (Wiseman 2022). While few of the creative relationships Gaumont possesses in contemporary French cinema are as visible as the one with Sy, many other creative personnel have worked across the company’s production for cinema and television, such as writer/director Fred Cavayé, who directed a number of genre films for the studio, including A bout portant/Point Blank (2010), as well as creating the series Nox (Canal+, 2018) for the company. As the last decade has been generally one of industrial and artistic convergence between television and film in Europe and around the world, it is perhaps not surprising to find that so many are working in both media, but producers like Gaumont play a vital role as intermediaries in facilitating the casting and staffing of the works in both media and therefore in driving that convergence.

Gaumont was able to connect Sy with Netflix in part because the company had already established a commercial partnership with the service with its aforementioned early collaborations on Netflix Original series. Beyond helping to maintain its creative relationship with stars like Sy, this relationship has also had a multifaceted impact on Gaumont’s French film output during this period. This is most clearly evident in the Netflix ‘Original’ films that Gaumont has produced. As has been noted by numerous scholars, Netflix uses the branding of films and series as ‘original’ works in ways that are loose and often misleading (Petruska and Woods 2019). A film that has been labelled as a Netflix Original can be a work that was fully financed by the platform, one for which the company has purchased all distribution rights while not actually participating in the production, or a work that is only distributed by Netflix in some parts of the world, with other permutations of financing and distribution possible. Gaumont has made numerous Netflix Original films using a number of different financial and contractual relationships.

The company has to date made three films with Netflix that were fully financed and distributed exclusively by the latter company. These include the French-set documentary feature Les Rois de l’arnaque/Lords of Scam (Guillaume Nicloux, 2021); Point Blank (Joe Lynch, 2019), an English-language remake of the aforementioned 2010 film A bout portant; and a Spanish-language remake of Burn Out (Yann Gozlan, 2017) entitled Centauro/Centaur (Daniel Calparsoro, 2022), which Gaumont co-produced with Spanish partners Borsalino Productions. The company also has an animated feature—High in the Clouds (Timothy Reckart)—currently in production with Netflix that will be produced in this way. Gaumont has also sold all global rights (i.e. including France) for one of its features to Netflix, namely Bronx/Rogue City (Olivier Marchal, 2020). The majority of the company’s film work with Netflix, however, have been films for which Gaumont handled French distribution (where the film was released in theatres and followed the French media chronology [chronologie des médias], the traditional release pattern that sees films made available across a series of retail ‘windows’ in a certain order and after prescribed windows of time) and then sold some or all of the international distribution rights to Netflix. Films distributed in this way include Burn Out, La Vie scolaire/School Life (Mehdi Idir and the Grand Corps Malade, 2019), Mystère/Vicky and Her Mystery (Denis Imbert, 2021) and the aforementioned Tout simplement noir.

These deals represent just a few of the dozens that Netflix has made to grow its French ‘original’ content, a growing branch of its overall library, and, as will be discussed later in the chapter, Gaumont is not alone among the major French studios in supplying original films to Netflix. But what do these deals mean for Gaumont itself? Before answering that question, some explanation of the various kinds of deals and their respective advantages and drawbacks is in order. Put crudely, films fully financed by Netflix represent the least risky arrangement for Gaumont because Netflix absorbs all the costs and takes all the distribution risk, but these deals also offer no opportunity for major commercial success as Netflix does not at present release films in theatres or sell them individually to users. This type of production is thus typically low-risk and brings only a mediocre reward as Netflix is known to pay above the cost of production in order to ensure the producers profit from the project, but there are no further revenues that can be obtained from the films.³ Global acquisitions function in a similar way, in the sense that the producers give up the potential to generate profits from selling the films in question to different outlets; the risk is somewhat higher for the producer as they have to get the film made without having guaranteed sales for it—though in the long run, the ownership of the film often returns to the producers. Finally, the model of retaining some distribution rights and selling others offers the producer the opportunity to profit from the film’s theatrical release in some territories (typically those in which the film was produced), while not facing the risk of the film failing to sell well in others. In the ideal scenario for the producer, the film does well in the home territories, leading to profits for the producer on top of what they received from Netflix for the international rights. For this reason, producers in Europe report that this is the most desirable model for making original films for streaming services (Meir 2023).

With this understanding of producer business models in mind, we can observe that Gaumont seems to have been very shrewd in its dealings with Netflix when it comes to original films. Firstly, leaving aside for now the two remakes, Gaumont has done relatively little film work that has been fully financed by Netflix and which were not remakes, with only a low-budget documentary film (the feature Les Rois de l’arnaque) and what is reported to be an ‘ambitious’ and therefore likely expensive computer-animated feature (High in the Clouds) having been made with Netflix money. The majority of its deals have been made in the mixed distribution model. Among these films are La Vie scolaire and Tout simplement noir, each of which did well at the French box office (1.8 million and 760,000 admissions, respectively) but which also faced numerous challenges when it came to international distribution. These challenges included their themes of race, class and French immigration, but also the complex and uncertain path that faced films that were released internationally during the COVID-19 crisis, which shuttered theatres around the world and left audiences wary about returning to the cinema in those countries that reopened their doors during 2020. The industrial fallout from COVID was also a major factor in Gaumont’s decision to sell all world rights to Bronx to Netflix. With theatres closed and a growing backlog of films waiting for theatrical releases in France, all films were risky investments in 2020, but few more so than Bronx, which had a reported budget of $13 million (Keslassy 2019), a high number by French standards. While the financial details of the film’s sale to Netflix have yet to be disclosed publicly, the simple fact that Gaumont was able to recoup anything from the film represented a positive outcome given the state of the exhibition industry at the time.

Getting Bronx distributed during the chaotic year of 2020 is just one example of how working with streaming platforms has helped Gaumont to address a long-standing problem for the company: the inability to consistently export its films to markets beyond France. The anomalous success of Intouchables notwithstanding, few Gaumont films in recent years have had a great deal of international success, with proceeds from international sales of its French movies consistently making up a small portion of its revenues. By selling such works to Netflix, Gaumont has been able to monetise its works without the risks that come with traditional film distribution. Another long-standing problem that Gaumont has been able to address with help from Netflix has been with the monetisation of its back catalogue of French films. Netflix has directly licensed some of these for use on its French service, while also licensing titles in other markets as well. Moreover, the remakes Gaumont has produced with Netflix can also be seen in this context, as the company was able to generate ancillary revenues from two library titles. In this way, Gaumont has participated in a larger trend in the European and US film industries that has seen those studios which possess large back catalogues of films attempt to use remakes in particular as a strategy to extract more value from those holdings (see Meir 2021).

Between these film-based collaborations and the numerous series that Gaumont has produced for Netflix, the relationship between the two companies has thus been a fruitful one. In fact, Gaumont has in the past reported Netflix to be (by some distance) its biggest individual buyer, far exceeding other companies in France or elsewhere, as was seen in 2019 when sales to Netflix made up some 46 per cent of the company’s revenue with no other company being responsible for more than 10 per cent of Gaumont’s revenues (Gaumont 2020, 49). Dumas’s intention to grow this relationship way back in 2012 has thus paid off in spades, resulting in a prolific partnership and one that has helped Gaumont to address some of its long-standing distribution problems, while also helping the French studio to mitigate some of the economic damage caused by COVID.

Gaumont’s Platform Original Films and Contemporary French Cinema

Whatever impact these film deals have had on Gaumont’s business, the question still remains as to what artistic and cultural impacts these films have had on French cinema more broadly, particularly as seen outside France, where Gaumont itself has managed the distribution of the majority of films. In attempting to answer this question, this section of the chapter will address not only the Netflix Original films that Gaumont has produced, but also Overdose (Olivier Marchal, 2022), a film that the company produced for Amazon Prime Video (Fig. 2). Surveying this corpus, there are two tendencies that can be discerned, tendencies that are broadly in line with other French original films commissioned and acquired by Netflix. In this way and in keeping with one of its core overall premises, this part of the chapter will also demonstrate that the tendencies found in Gaumont’s original film production are emblematic of the broader impact that streaming services are having on French cinema as we know it.

Fig. 2

Gaumont reunited much of the creative team behind Bronx for Overdose, which it produced for Amazon Prime Video

The first of these tendencies is one that has thrust race and ethnicity to the forefront of the representations found in French films. Observers of Netflix’s commissioning strategies will perhaps not be surprised by this finding as the company’s work has long been shaped by a pronounced interest in multiracial casting and other forms of diversity in terms of on-screen and off-screen representation (Jenner 2018, 171–176). Indeed, these efforts have become very important to Netflix’s self-promotional efforts, with the company going as far as commissioning studies of its (US) films and series in order to highlight its achievements in inclusion and the ways in which it could improve on this front (Smith et al. 2021). Tout simplement noir is perhaps the most obvious example of this larger tendency to be found among Gaumont’s Netflix films, but it is also a core theme in La Vie scolaire, which deals with the parallel lives of the working-class, multiracial and largely first- and second-generation immigrant student body at a secondary school in the banlieue of Saint Denis and their middle-class but also multiracial teachers, who are also often the children of immigrants to France. Race and immigration are of course also prominent themes in Lupin, as they are in a large number of Netflix Original films from France. Such can be seen in Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016), the first film Netflix acquired as an original film from the country, along with numerous other examples, including Banlieusards/Street Flow (Kery James and Leïla Sy, 2019), one of the first French films that Netflix fully financed. A short list of other significant examples would include the controversial film Mignonnes/Cuties (Maïmouna Doucouré, 2020), other auteur works such as Une fille facile/An Easy Girl (Rebecca Zlotowski, 2019) and Shéhérazade (Jean-Bernard Marlin, 2018), as well as numerous others.⁴

Race and racial conflict also play a part in the second tendency found in Gaumont’s original films for streaming platforms, but the ideological treatment of these themes is decidedly more ambiguous than their seemingly ‘progressive’ representations seen in the first tendency. Here I am referring to the action films that Gaumont has produced for and/or sold to Netflix and Amazon. Gaumont has sold two such films in their original form to Netflix: Burn Out and Bronx; it has also remade two of its French library titles for Netflix (the previously discussed Point Blank and Centauro) and has agreed to produce another film in this genre for Amazon: Overdose, which will be directed by Bronx’s director Olivier Marchal. Finally, with its depiction of organised criminals who move from wire fraud to murder, Les Rois de l’arnaque could be described as sharing many elements in common with the action films, even if it is a documentary. These films are part of a larger corpus of French action cinema that has been sought after by Netflix, with the company counting numerous examples of the genre by French filmmakers among its catalogue of original films. These include a number of films directed by Julien Leclercq (Braqueurs/The Crew [2015], La Terre et le sang/Earth and Blood [2020] and Sentinelle [2021]), who has proven himself something of a favourite of the company, leading to a relationship that involved Leclercq writing and producing Braqueurs/Gangland (Netflix, 2021–), a series remake of his film The Crew. Other prominent examples include Balle perdue/Lost Bullet (Guillaume Pierret, 2020, examined by Charlie Michael’s chapter in this volume), which is being turned into a trilogy by Netflix after the success of the first film on the service; the French box-office hit Bac Nord/The Stronghold (Cédric Jimenez, 2020); and Loin du périph/The Take Down (Louis Leterrier, 2022), a star vehicle for Omar Sy, and the first film made as part of a multi-picture deal the star made with Netflix following the success of Lupin.

Among this group are to be found films that contrast very sharply with Netflix’s self-promotion as a home to progressive representations of race. While there are some exceptions, the majority of them feature representational politics that are much more problematic than those seen in films like Tout simplement noir or La Vie scolaire. They often feature Black and darker-complexioned inner-city men as murderous villains, whereas protagonists are cast as White or light-complexioned men of North African descent. Such a schema can be seen in Leclercq’s films Les Braqueurs and La Terre et le sang, where characters played by Sami Bouajila face off against Black street gang members. It is also notable that Bac Nord, a film that received highly dubious praise from Marine Le Pen on its release in France, features prominently within this corpus. Within this context, Gaumont’s contributions are less problematic than others, in the sense of having multiple sympathetic Black characters, but still nonetheless feature White protagonists and both Romany (Burn Out) and Black (Bronx) antagonists.

While reliable viewing figures are notoriously hard to come by for streaming services generally and Netflix in particular, French action films do seem to be very popular on the service, at least relative to other films that were not made in English. In 2020, for example, Netflix released a list of its most popular non-English-language films in the USA, three of which were French action films: Balle perdue, Les Braquers and Bronx (Grater 2020). Gaumont’s Burn Out was also one of the first examples of the genre to arrive on Netflix, preceded only by Leclercq’s Les Braquers, thus helping to solidify the national genre’s place on the world’s biggest (S)VoD service. With that place now seemingly well established, Amazon is following Netflix’s lead in producing Overdose with Gaumont, a film that, besides sharing a director with Bronx, also features a plot involving smugglers racing against the police to deliver drugs from Spain to France, thus closely resembling those of Burn Out and Balle perdue.

It should be abundantly clear by now that Gaumont played a central part in many trends that have characterised the streaming era in the global audiovisual industry generally—those being the convergence between the film and television industries and the reliance on streaming services to export new films and to monetise older films—and in French cinema specifically, namely tendencies contributing towards diverse representations of multiracial France and the growing popularity of the action genre. Gaumont’s trailblazing role can be seen in the many ways the company’s corporate rivals in France have imitated its strategic moves during this period. StudioCanal, for example, forcefully moved into series production shortly after Gaumont made its move (Meir 2019, 106–111) and has also sold numerous films made in both English and French to Netflix and Amazon for international distribution, works that include the aforementioned The Stronghold, Le Monde est toi/The World is Yours (Romain Gavras, 2018) and others.⁵ Pathé has likewise used Netflix’s financial and distribution muscle to co-produce the forthcoming reboot of the Astérix and Obelix franchise, entitled Astérix & Obélix: l’Empire du Milieu/Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom (Guillaume Canet, 2023), while the company has also made the Dany Boon star vehicle 8 Rue de l’Humanité/Stuck Together (Boon, 2021) for Netflix directly, as well as producing a series about the Notre-Dame cathedral fire for the platform. All the French studios have also followed Gaumont’s lead in finding ways to remake films that often end up on streaming services in one form or another, typified by Pathé’s CODA (Sian Heder, 2021), a remake of La Famille Bélier/The Bélier Family (Eric Lartigau, 2014), which of course won an Oscar for Apple TV+ and Pathé (see Gemma King’s chapter in this collection), or the forthcoming remake of Les Invisibles/The Invisibles (Louis-Julien Petit, 2018), a film sold to Netflix by Wild Bunch.

By acting as a pioneer in this new era, and shifting so quickly and decisively to the business models and creative strategies that would allow the company not only to weather the challenges presented by streaming but also to mitigate the dangers of the COVID-19 crisis, Gaumont has distinguished itself as one of the most important companies of the period. It is difficult to speculate about hypotheticals, but it is very probable that Gaumont would not have formed the relationship it did with Netflix if the company hadn’t committed to series production in the early 2010s, and likewise, the company was surely spared the worst of the COVID impacts by no longer owning theatres and also having the contacts needed to shift its riskiest film project at the time to streaming. While Gaumont is made up of thousands of employees whose labour drives the organisation and oversees its creative output, CEO Sidonie Dumas also deserves a great deal of credit for her strategic vision that led to the company’s current successes. Other chapters in this collection have highlighted important women in French cinema, but as a closing point it is worth noting that very little is said in either French cinema scholarship or journalism about the lack of women in the boardrooms of the national industry. Working in a male-dominated industry (particularly at the management level) and as the heiress to an already well-established family business, Dumas could easily have been complacent and continued following her family’s lead. Instead, she took bold risks that have paid off handsomely, transforming the world’s oldest film company into one of the leading European studios at the dawn of the streaming era. When the historiographies of the period are written, they must therefore include Dumas as one of its most important figures.