How Brexit is already hitting the British film industry

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Thanks to Brexit, the United Kingdom ventures out into the unknown. As the first country to leave the European Union, there’s really no precedent for the after effects.

Many businesses are having to adjust, including those in the film industry. One of the major caveats of Brexit could be co-productions between the UK and European companies — such as Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake — stop happening.

“We are already feeling the pinch of Brexit,” Pascal Borno of Conquistador Entertainment told The Hollywood Reporter. “Since Brexit, the pound has plummeted and [British] buyers are pulling back on pre-buys because they are afraid if the pound keeps dropping, it will get down to par [with the dollar], which, if you do the math, is half of what it was two years ago.”

UK films are currently classified as European productions, which makes distribution in other European countries easier. For instance, being a European film helps bypass France’s international movie quota. Post-Brexit, we will likely lose this luxury.

Plus, the EU’s Creative Europe programme offers subsidies and incentives to European based distributors to take European-based films, helping smaller studios get their films released.

As Mike Goodridge of Protagonist Pictures tells THR, European buyers will simply “switch to French, German or Belgian movies… British films are good, but they aren’t that good.”

Despite this, Daniel Battsek, who returned from the US following the Brexit vote to helm Film4, remains optimistic: “The film industry is good at finding ways and means of ploughing whatever course it needs to plough to keep doing what it’s doing. I’m fairly optimistic that whatever the downside, there will be an alternative to it.”

How and when the United Kingdom leaves the EU remains to be seen, the result of the ongoing general election likely changing things once more.