If you will again witness the Dantesque spectacle of an industry that has decided to exchange the applause of the respected for the BOE. A report from the Instituto Juan de Mariana, “More subvención y menos público”, chronicles the announced defunción: the culture of Spanish cinema as artistic and entrepreneurialnow reduced to a mere addition to the public presupuesta.
Under the palio de la “cultural exceptionalism” —this fetish of inefficiency—has built a system of perverse incentives where the result is nothing more than a price tag, down to the ability of producers to earn extra income from the state. It is the triumph of presuppositional endogamy over the supremacy of the consumer.
The characters are dull. Between 2013 and 2025, direct support and fiscal benefits have multiplied by 3.6, while the price of the country’s national film market has been declining, exceeding only 17% in the best years.
by way of example, 364 films produced by 2025: 87% of them did not exceed 100,000 euros per dollar and one of the 106 cars won’t cost you €1,000 in cash. For just 28 minutes, it was possible to surpass the shadow of 100,000 viewers. In short, the increase in gas did not reverse the downward structural trend of domestic cinema.
After the entrance to the place of business is untied, the umbilical cord that connects the creator to the audience is severed. The filmmaker does not need to seduce the viewer, he is a capricious stormtrooper who votes with his paper; enough to please a bureaucrat on duty whose aesthetic preferences are usually as dry as the desert of Almería, but not as epic.
If Spanish cinema wants to live on, it has to take care of humility and the market
This bias is a manual case of reverse selection: it doesn’t reward talent capable of generating value, down to an expert in capturing rents.
It is extreme that the cost to the audience in partial films is equivalent to multiplying the price of the average recording by ten. In practice, the taxpayer suppresses the celebration of the elite, whose films are shown before the holidays in a ritual of summer onanism. It is the apotheosis of “cinema de autor” understood as an inalienable derecho to burn what nobody cared about, for everyone’s money.
Interventionism, perhaps the balm that heals industrial wounds, is the poison that causes gangrene. By flooding the sector with more than €100m per year through direct aid from the ICAA alone – not counting public service television and fiscal incentives that boost income to alien levels – genuine private inversion is precluded and a hypertrophied cost structure is encouraged. When one is socialized, there is no gas discipline.
For every euro that the state takes from productive activity to include in films that do not reach the families of the directors, it produces a lost net of happiness. It is the opportunity cost of cultural domination: hospitals or slaves impuestos sacrificed on the altar of cinema, committed to ignoring that cinema is above all an industry.
But it is clear that this concept is a very common thing “an economist without a soul” for the scenes of the subvendo artist.
Spanish cinema was transformed into an extractive sector, similar to the old INI public companies, but with a red tint. A small number of titles capture the vast majority of reviews, while a “large group” of phantom products survive only thanks to the administrative office.
The addiction is such that any attempt at reform is met with cries of censorship or attacks on free speech where the only one in the game is privileged to live at the expense of the other. It’s satire in a way: those who dare to rebel the most are those who accept public assumptions with the greatest vigor.
The damage is structural. The human capital necessary to compete in the global market has been destroyed. While the platforms show that they have content in Spanish, our “official” film continues to be encapsulated in themes that the audience systematically listens.
In order to create attractive films, the products were developed by the specialist legal departments of subvenes engineering. It’s the tragedy of the commons applied to celluloid, y the public responded with the only weapon it had: absence.
If Spanish cinema wants to live on, it must find a cure for humility and marketability. You must leave the administrative bottle and follow the rules of the rooms without the security department of the cashier. Culture cannot be defined by blocking it from competence without allowing it to flourish in freedom, assuming that risk is a necessary part of creativity.
Everything else is not art; It’s simply creative freight accounting exhausting tax payer who doesn’t care anymore on the coast.
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