Canal+ pre-buys the rights to nearly three out of every four French films produced each year. Last Sunday, its chairman announced the company would no longer work with 600 of the professionals who make those films — because they had signed a petition criticizing his boss.

The petition, published in Libération on May 11, accused billionaire Vincent Bolloré — Canal+’s controlling shareholder — of leading a “reactionary, far-right ‘civilisational project’” and warned that his expanding grip on French cinema risked “a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.” Signatories included some of the country’s most recognized names — Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel, Raymond Depardon — alongside hundreds of producers, technicians, and cinema operators.

Maxime Saada, Canal+ chairman, delivered his response at a producers’ brunch during the Cannes Film Festival. “I don’t want to work with people who call me a cryptofascist,” he said, according to Les Échos. He characterized the petition as “an injustice towards the Canal+ teams” and declared that the company would cut ties with all 600 signatories.

The Numbers Behind the Blacklist

The structural problem was hiding in plain sight long before Cannes. According to CNC, France’s national film funding body, Canal+ received 43.6 percent of all investments in French broadcasting and streaming content in 2024. The group pre-bought 74 percent of French feature films produced that year, with an average contribution of €1.3 million per film. A three-year agreement signed in 2025 commits Canal+ to investing at least €480 million in French cinema through 2027.

“Canal+ is the leading financier of French cinema,” film journalist Estelle Aubin told France 24. “They invest huge sums in films before they are even made, paying producers upfront. Without that, the entire ecosystem is at risk.”

From Production to Projection

The dependency extends beyond financing. Last year, Canal+ acquired a 34 percent stake in UGC, France’s second-largest cinema chain, with a path to full ownership by 2028. The petition’s signatories warned that this puts Bolloré in position to control “the entire fabrication chain of films from their financing to their distribution and their release on the big and small screen.”

Bolloré’s media empire also includes CNews, a television channel widely criticized for amplifying far-right voices, and Europe 1 radio. France 24 culture journalist Olivia Salazar-Winspear drew a direct historical parallel: “This kind of blacklist recalls McCarthyism in the 1940s, when the studio system sidelined anyone suspected of holding ‘un-American’ views and derailed or ended careers.”

The pattern repeats across Bolloré’s media acquisitions. Le Journal du Dimanche faced strikes in 2023 after a Bolloré-backed editor took over. Éditions Grasset, the publishing house, experienced similar turmoil. At Canal+, direct editorial intervention has been limited but visible: Bolloré reportedly blocked the acquisition of François Ozon’s “Grâce à Dieu,” a film about clerical sexual abuse, and pushed writers on the Canal+ series “Paris Police 1905” to remove references to France’s 1905 law separating church and state.

The Answer Was Always the Blacklist

Claire, a member of the Zapper Bolloré collective that organized the petition, told Le Monde the reprisals confirmed their central argument. “For me, Maxime Saada’s reaction only confirms what the open letter denounces,” she said, requesting anonymity. She stressed that Canal+ itself was never the target — the goal was to oppose Bolloré’s UGC acquisition and spark debate ahead of France’s next presidential election.

No major filmmaker has publicly pledged to stop working with Canal+. The financial mathematics make that nearly unthinkable. Salomé Gadafi, deputy secretary-general of the CGT entertainment union, framed the moment as a collective test: “But you cannot blacklist an entire profession. This is the moment for people to stand together.”

The signatories warned that the ideological influence on film content “has been discreet so far” but added: “we are under no illusions: it won’t last.” The blacklist arrived six days later. Nobody had to wait.

Sources