France’s public auditor, the Cour des comptes, has proposed capping the taxes earmarked for the CNC, the national film and moving-image body, at €690m ($772m) a year. That is €157m ($176m) less than the €847m those taxes are forecast to raise in 2026. The cap is one of 18 short-term measures in a report on repairing the public finances, published on Monday 9 November, which together are worth €32bn to €38bn from 2027.
At stake is a basic feature of French film finance: money raised from the businesses that show films flows back to the CNC without a ceiling. A cap would put those receipts up for review in each year’s budget, and anything collected above it would stay with the state. Producers, distributors and exhibitors draw their automatic and selective support from that pool, so the fund would no longer grow when ticket sales or streaming subscriptions do.
Key facts
- Proposal: cap the CNC’s earmarked taxes at €690m a year, against a 2026 forecast of €847m; saving €157m, counted at €0.16bn in 2027
- Growth: the taxes rose by €154m, or 21%, between 2022 and 2025, which the auditor says does not match the CNC’s needs
- Earlier levies: the state took €500m ($560m) of the CNC’s reserves in 2025 and a further sum in 2026, €550m in all, according to the culture ministry
- Status: a recommendation; a cap needs a provision in the first part of a finance law
- The CNC is one of seven state bodies that received €2.3bn of uncapped earmarked taxes between them in 2026, according to the report
What the auditor proposes
The CNC is funded mainly by levies on the companies that bring films and series to audiences: a tax on cinema tickets, a tax on television broadcasters and distributors, and a tax on video and on-demand services, which includes the subscription streamers. Most earmarked taxes in France are capped. The CNC’s are not, so whatever they raise goes to the CNC.
The Cour des comptes calls that “an anomaly”. In its account, the taxes rose by €154m, or 21%, between 2022 and 2025, a rise it says does not match the need for “more selective” support. A cap, it argues, would prevent either a permanent scattering of aid across schemes or the build-up of surplus reserves. The €690m level is borrowed from a 2024 spending review of film support by the Inspection générale des finances (IGF), the finance ministry’s audit body, which proposed capping the CNC’s tax receipts at about that figure to end what it called the “procyclicality” of automatic support.
The cap sits in a chapter on culture and youth spending, next to two other proposals: bringing the civic-service scheme back to 100,000 young people and means-testing the Pass Culture, the state’s cultural spending credit for teenagers. The three would save €0.25bn in 2027 and €0.36bn a year at full effect. The CNC cap is the largest of them, at €0.16bn, or almost two-thirds of the 2027 total.
The numbers and the CNC’s case
Measured against the 2026 forecast, the €157m saving equals about 19% of the CNC’s earmarked receipts, a FilmBunch calculation from the report’s figures. The report’s own table puts CNC-related spending at €0.9bn in 2025 and €0.8bn planned for 2026, both rounded.
French trade reports differ on the size of the cut. Boxoffice Pro put it at €140m, measured against the 2026 forecast the CNC presented to the industry at its Chavane commission. The auditor measures the cap against €847m and arrives at €157m, the figure Ecran total also reported.
The CNC’s own figures put the rise in context. At the Chavane commission, its legal and financial director, Alexis Goin, said its receipts had been flat for more than a decade before the recent jump and had grown at half the rate of inflation, according to Boxoffice Pro. Much of the rise came from the tax on paying streaming services, whose rate went from 2% to 5.15% in 2020 and whose yield climbed from €73m that year to €155m in 2025. The CNC’s latest annual report expects that market to consolidate, and a cut to the tax on broadcasters, voted in the 2026 budget, is expected to cost it about €30m this year, the trade publication reported.
The reserves have already been drawn down. The IGF review recommended a one-off levy of €462m on the CNC’s cash; parliament took €500m in the 2025 finance law. In a written answer to a deputy published in June, the culture ministry said the 2025 and 2026 levies came to €550m together, halved the CNC’s cash and left its financial safety ratios at a minimum. The IGF also found that public aid’s share of French film financing almost doubled between 2012 and 2023, from 16% to 29%.
What happens next
A recommendation from the Cour des comptes has no force by itself. According to the report, a cap would need a provision in the first part of a finance law changing the ceiling on earmarked taxes, and the 2027 budget could end the anomaly for all seven uncapped bodies. France’s 2027 finance bill, tabled on 1 October, is already before parliament, where film financing has been contested since September over a proposed VAT rise on pay-television subscriptions.
Our reading
A cap would change how the French system behaves more than what it spends next year. Uncapped, the CNC’s receipts have moved with the market, which is how streaming growth lifted them after 2020. Capped, the extra money from a strong box-office year or a new tax on platforms would go to the Treasury. For producers who plan around automatic support, the larger risk is not a cut to any one scheme but the loss of the link between the size of the market and the size of the fund.
The counter-case rests on timing. Two levies have already taken €550m from the CNC’s reserves, the streaming tax that drove the rise is expected to level off, and the auditor’s €157m would come on top. The next evidence is whether a cap appears as an amendment to the 2027 finance bill, and at what level. Elsewhere, public film money is moving the other way, with Guatemala creating its first production fund and Canada splitting a C$600m audiovisual package.
Sources
- Cour des comptes, Contribution au rétablissement des finances publiques: mesures à court terme et leviers d’action à moyen terme (report, 9 November 2026; measure 5 and annex; earmarked taxes, part two)
- Cour des comptes, publication page for the report (9 November 2026)
- Inspection générale des finances, Revue de dépenses relative aux aides au cinéma (report no. 2024-M-017-03, September 2024, published July 2025)
- Vie-publique.fr, summary of the IGF spending review of film support
- Assemblée nationale, written question no. 14220 and the culture ministry’s answer on the Cour des comptes’ CNC report (answer published 9 June 2026)
- Boxoffice Pro (France), La Cour des comptes veut plafonner les recettes du CNC (12 November 2026)
- Ecran total, La Cour des comptes propose de plafonner les ressources du CNC à 690 millions d’euros (10 November 2026)
- European Central Bank, euro reference rate, 9 November 2026 (USD 1.1193)