Why the French government called a Steven Spielberg classic “a threat to national identity”
Even though he’s unquestionably one of Hollywood’s least offensive and controversial filmmakers, Steven Spielberg still managed to piss off the entire French government by doing nothing more than making a movie.
While the three-time Academy Award winner and highest-grossing director in cinema history has helmed plenty of films that trade in hard-hitting, weighty, and profound subject matter, he’s never been one to find himself embroiled in petty squabbles, behind-the-scenes discontent, or furious rows over his work.
His untouchable career has never become intertwined with negativity, bad buzz, or denouncement, which made it particularly strange that one of his many classics was singled out by those in the Parisian corridors of power as emblematic of everything wrong with America’s global cultural takeover.
All he did was make a movie, and a very good one. The most successful ever made, in fact, with Jurassic Park dislodging Spielberg’s own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to become the top-earning film of all time when it swept through cinemas to become the must-see blockbuster of 1993.
And yet, despite over 64% of the prehistoric spectacular’s box office receipts coming from outside the United States, it was only the French who called him out for muscling local pictures out of theatres. American movies were already cannibalising screens, but Jurassic Park was seen as the final straw.
“Mr Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is a menace to French culture,” said someone in the know: then-culture minister Jacques Toubon per CSN. “With 450 copies, it will show in one of every five movie theatres in cities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.”
To try to stem the onslaught of Stateside-made films crowding out local filmmakers, France enacted several preventative measures, including vast spending on subsidies, interest-free loans to filmmakers, and restrictions on the volume of imported movies and TV shows.
Going above pre-agreed European mandates, the French made it obligatory that 60% of everything shown on television be produced on the continent, 40% of which legally had to be created on local shores, with homemade productions even being granted the most favourable primetime slots.
When Jurassic Park stomped onto the scene to dominate the conversation and announce itself as an event the likes of which the industry had never witnessed before, government officials branded the groundbreaking CGI extravaganza as “a threat to national identity” that had the potential to increase America’s stranglehold on French multiplexes further.
Did it work? It’s debatable. While the measures implemented by the top brass ensured that French-made features retained a heavy presence in cinemas, the country was also one of Jurassic Park‘s most lucrative markets, earning north of $40 million. The only places where it made more money during its initial theatrical run and various re-releases are the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, and China.
That appears to make it pretty clear that, regardless of the folks in power doing their best to denigrate Spielberg’s classic as a looming cultural threat that was gradually erasing locality and national identity from big screens across the country, the population voted with their wallets and outlined that they had no issues watching Jurassic Park.
