After 35 years of EU film funding, the continent still has 27 national cinema markets rather than one.
On July 17 Universal released Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It was shot in the Peloponnese, on the Sicilian island of Favignana, in Morocco, Scotland and Iceland. By mid-September it had passed 1.67 billion US dollars worldwide, the highest-grossing film of Nolan’s career and in Universal’s history.
One of the oldest surviving works of European literature, filmed largely on European coasts, made its money for a California studio.
The arrangement is familiar. Ridley Scott made Napoleon for Apple and Gladiator II for Paramount. Nolan made Dunkirk for Warner Bros. The studios are American and both directors are British-born. Neither country belongs to the EU.
The arithmetic
The EU does not lack cinemagoers. In 2024 cinemas in the 27 member states sold 642 million tickets and took 4.99 billion euros, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory. The trouble is what those tickets are for. In nine EU markets the Observatory studied, among them France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland, national films took 28 per cent of admissions in 2024 and films from outside the Union, mostly American, about two-thirds. Films from other EU countries accounted for around five per cent over 2020–24, roughly one ticket in twenty.
France is the exception the statistics keep confirming. French films took 44.8 per cent of admissions at home in 2024 and about 38 per cent in 2025, according to the CNC, France’s film agency. Last year the agency approved 228 French-initiative films with an average budget of 4.89 million euros; the Observatory puts the average budget of a European live-action fiction film at 3.17 million euros. Pathé’s The Count of Monte Cristo, made for 42.9 million euros, sold more than nine million tickets at home and took around 100 million US dollars worldwide. Unifrance counts about 42.5 million tickets sold for French films abroad in 2025, a figure that includes minority co-productions.
Elsewhere in the Union, films often travel on the strength of their director’s name. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida gave Poland its first Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2015, and Cold War won him the best director award at Cannes. Pedro Almodóvar, Ruben Östlund and Yorgos Lanthimos are brands in their own right.
Many of the EU directors who break out globally do it in English. The French director Coralie Fargeat shot The Substancein English with Demi Moore. Lanthimos, who is Greek, made Poor Things in English, in Budapest. Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the most expensive French film ever made, was also in English. It cost 197 million euros and took 226 million US dollars worldwide.
Europe does tell its own stories. It tells them in 24 official languages, mostly to itself, one country at a time.
Billions with a national address
Money has never been the missing ingredient. By the Commission’s count, the EU’s MEDIA programme had invested more than 2.6 billion euros in film and audiovisual industries between 1991 and 2021. For 2021–27 it has about 1.4 billion euros, out of 2.44 billion euros for Creative Europe as a whole. The Council of Europe’s Eurimages fund has backed 2,675 co-productions with some 764 million euros since 1989; in 2025 it supported 91 of them, at an average of 303,500 euros each.
Brussels can point to results. A Commission evaluation published in December 2025 found that films backed by MEDIA reached cinemas in about 6.6 more EU countries than comparable films without support. For individual films, MEDIA works. The market has barely moved: films from outside the Union still take about two tickets in three.
National aid pulls the other way. Under the Commission’s 2013 Cinema Communication, a member state may require producers to spend up to 160 per cent of a grant on its territory, up to 80 per cent of the film’s budget. Each fund is designed to keep its money at home, and a film financed by three funds must satisfy three treasuries. In the Observatory’s sample of 673 European live-action fiction films released in 2023, direct public funding and production incentives covered 47 per cent of the financing. When half the budget is secured before the first screening, a second country’s box office becomes optional.
Co-production was supposed to solve part of this problem. Co-productions made up 24 per cent of European films between 2010 and 2015, and they work. They generated three times as many admissions as purely national films, and 62.9 per cent of majority co-productions were released abroad, against 32.1 per cent of national productions. Some 84 per cent of the works MEDIA supports today are co-productions.
Too often, though, a European co-production adds up subsidies rather than audiences. Each partner brings a national fund, a tax rebate or a broadcaster, and each brings a spending obligation with it. A Eurimages contribution of 300,000 euros completes a financing plan. It does not buy a release in 20 countries. Europe has rarely attempted a film conceived from the outset for an audience of 450 million.
One market, elsewhere
The film industries Europe likes to compare itself with all have one thing in common: scale at home. North American cinemas took $8.87 billion in 2025. China’s box office reached 51.8 billion yuan, about 7.4 billion US dollars, and Chinese films took almost 80 per cent of it. Indian cinemas sold 832 million tickets worth 133.95 billion rupees.
Scale at home does not guarantee sales abroad. Ne Zha 2, the Chinese animation that crossed $2 billion in 2025, took more than 15 billion yuan in mainland China. Well over 95 per cent of its takings came from its home market. A film that can recover its budget in one market can afford to take risks; exports come later, if at all. Of the three, only Hollywood has turned its domestic market into a global business.
The EU has 450 million people and a box office of about five billion euros. On paper it is a single market. For films it is still 27, divided by language and by contract. Rights are sold country by country, and the 2018 Geo-blocking Regulation left audiovisual services out of its scope. In January 2025 the European Court of Auditors recommended that the Commission examine whether to extend it to them. Producers and distributors reply that territorial exclusivity is how European films get made, because pre-sales to individual countries pay for production. They have a point. The model that finances European films is the same one that keeps them at home.
Netflix has already shown what pan-European distribution can look like. Its executives have said it spent about 6.5 billion euros on non-English-language European series and films between 2020 and 2023, more than the MEDIA programme has spent in 35 years. Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a German adaptation of a German novel, won four Oscars in 2023 as a Netflix release. In the same nine EU markets, films from other EU countries took about 11 per cent of the time spent watching cinema films on Netflix, Prime Video, HBO Max and Disney+, more than twice their share of cinema tickets. EU films cross the Union’s internal borders more easily on American platforms than in its own cinemas.
A backlot east of Vienna
Central Europe sees all this from the production side. Hungary’s 30 per cent rebate, extended to 2030 with a projected budget of three billion US dollars, has made Budapest one of Hollywood’s preferred stages. Annual direct film production spending reached 910 million US dollars by late 2024, about four times the level of five years earlier. Dune: Part Three was shot in and around Budapest; Poor Things and The Brutalist used Hungarian locations and crews.
Poland introduced its own 30 per cent rebate in 2019. Two Oscar-winning films of the past three years had the same Polish producer, Ewa Puszczyńska. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest was shot around Auschwitz, mostly in German, with the Polish Film Institute among its backers. It won the 2024 Oscar for best international feature for the United Kingdom. Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, a low-budget Polish–American co-production, was shot at Majdanek and in Krasnystaw, where his family came from, with some 100 Polish crew members and incentive support from the Polish Film Institute. Searchlight, an American studio, released it, and it won Kieran Culkin the 2025 Oscar for best supporting actor. Days after the ceremony, Eisenberg received Polish citizenship.
Audiences in the region still go to see their own films. Polish cinemas drew roughly 50 million admissions in 2025, and industry estimates put Polish films at about 27 per cent of box-office revenue; Dom dobry (Home Sweet Home), the year’s biggest local title, sold 2.4 million. The region has the studios, the crews, the incentives and the viewers. What it rents to Hollywood it could also offer to European productions made for the whole continent.
After 2027
In July 2025 the Commission proposed merging Creative Europe into a new programme, AgoraEU, worth 8.6 billion euros for 2028–34. Its MEDIA+ strand would receive 3.2 billion euros, more than twice the current MEDIA budget, although it is also meant to support news media. The Council adopted a partial negotiating mandate in May 2026, leaving the money to the wider talks on the 2028–34 budget. Industry groups mostly worry that film will lose out to journalism.
Doubling the budget will change little if the money rewards the same things. Most European film support today is awarded before a film is made, by funds that want it made at home. A larger share could follow audiences abroad: automatic support tied to tickets sold outside the home market, money for simultaneous releases in several countries with subtitles and dubbing, and rules that let co-producers meet spending obligations anywhere in the Union, not in each national treasury separately. A European film that sells tickets in five countries should be worth more to Brussels than one that sells them in none.
Flow shows what is possible. The Latvian, French and Belgian co-production, backed by Eurimages and distributed with MEDIA support, was made for 3.5 million euros. It won the Oscar for best animated feature in March 2025 and passed 50 million US dollars at the global box office. Its characters, a cat among them, never say a word.
Homer needed rather more.
Photo: Dreamstime.