The Lumière Summit’s plea to protect the viewer’s autonomy is deeply insulting to the hardworking executives who have spent billions perfecting the science of holding our eyeballs hostage.
Last Monday, the global film elite gathered in the idyllic French commune of Saint-Paul-de-Vence to adopt the Lumière Declaration on the Future of Cinema. It was a lovely, quaint little affair jointly presented by France and the Republic of Korea, filled with the sort of people who still believe a slow pan across a wheat field is a substitute for a strong third-act explosion. The delegates released fifteen sweeping principles for global film governance, the most headline-grabbing of which declared that audience attention is a trust to be honored, not a resource to be captured.
It is a beautiful, poetic sentiment. It is also deeply insulting to the hardworking men and women of this industry who have spent billions of dollars perfecting the science of holding your eyeballs hostage until the mid-roll advertising clears.
Make no mistake, the discourse surrounding this summit has been entirely hijacked by idealists who fundamentally misunderstand what a movie actually is. I have been covering the entertainment business for two decades. I have shared charcuterie boards with studio heads and traded gossip with agents at the Polo Lounge. I can assure you that if audience attention was not a resource to be aggressively harvested, refined, and sold to the highest bidder at the box office, we would not have an industry. We would just have a bunch of very expensive, heavily subsidized hobbies playing in empty rooms.
To understand why the Lumière delegates are so dangerously out of touch, you have to look at how modern storytelling actually functions. Earlier this week, I sat down for a chopped salad with a senior analytics executive at a major digital platform. We spent two hours discussing the rollout for their upcoming slate, and not once did he mention honoring a trust. He mentioned completion rates. He talked about second-screen optimization. He enthusiastically showed me a proprietary algorithm that triggers a localized high-frequency hum in the audio mix every time a viewer's heart rate drops below a monetizable threshold.
This is not a dystopia; this is the golden age of narrative engagement. When the representatives from France and Korea call for cinema to respect the viewer's autonomy, they are essentially asking us to leave unprecedented amounts of money on the table. Why on earth would we trust a viewer to sit in a dark room and pay attention out of their own free will?
Have you met a viewer recently? They are erratic. They are undisciplined. They look at their phones during the emotional climax to check if their grocery delivery has arrived. They need to be digitally corralled into a state of vegetative loyalty. If we do not capture their attention by force, someone on a competing app will capture it with a fifteen-second dance trend.
The Lumière Declaration reeks of the kind of elitism that pretends a three-hour contemplative indie drama is somehow morally superior to a franchise film that seamlessly integrates a QR code for a branded chicken sandwich during its emotional climax. We are in the business of show, not the business of polite restraint. Awards season always brings out this performative reverence for the sanctity of the cinematic experience, but the people voting for these prizes are the same ones relying on targeted algorithmic retention to pay for their Malibu beach houses.
If we are not treating the audience's retinas as prime real estate to be aggressively fracked for engagement data, we are committing fiduciary malpractice.
Exactly. When you strip away the romanticism of opening night and the polite fiction of the promotional circuit, the moving image is simply a delivery mechanism for intellectual property and behavioral conditioning. The summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence wants to protect the viewer, but they fail to realize that the modern cinematic experience is, at its core, a highly sophisticated hostage situation. And the hostages love it.
The declaration lists fifteen principles in total, all of them equally hostile to the concept of turning a profit. Principle number four, for example, demands that algorithms be designed to promote cultural diversity rather than maximize viewing time. I had to read that sentence three times just to make sure I was not having a stroke. If I wanted to promote cultural diversity at the expense of viewing time, I would simply burn my own money in a trash can outside the Palais des Festivals. The entire purpose of an algorithm is to figure out exactly what flavor of mind-numbing repetition keeps a viewer paralyzed on their couch, and then serve them that flavor until they fall asleep. Asking an algorithm to prioritize culture is like asking a shark to prioritize veganism.
Consider the staggering arrogance of the phrase a trust to be honored. A trust implies a relationship between equals. The relationship between a global media conglomerate and a suburban teenager with a borrowed streaming password is not a trust. It is a one-way extraction pipeline, and it is beautiful in its efficiency. When a studio spends two hundred million dollars on a sequel, they are not asking for a solemn pact with the audience. They are deploying a psychological weapon designed to override the viewer's prefrontal cortex until they purchase a promotional plastic cup.
The delegates in France seem to think that if we stop treating attention as a resource, the art form will organically flourish. But art requires friction. Art requires stakes. And right now, the greatest stakes facing any creator is figuring out how to keep a viewer engaged while they are simultaneously playing a mobile game, arguing with their spouse, and browsing real estate listings in a city they will never move to.
I have seen the internal analytics. I know what happens when you honor a trust instead of capturing a resource. The audience gets bored, they wander off to watch a live-stream of a teenager unboxing a toaster, and suddenly a key grip in Atlanta loses his union health insurance. Is that what the Lumière Summit wants? Mass unemployment in the name of artistic dignity?
The French and Korean delegations can draft as many declarations as they like. They can hold symposiums in medieval villages and sip un-oaked Chardonnay while lamenting the death of the human attention span. But back here in the trenches of the content mines, we know the truth.
Your attention is the crude oil of the twenty-first century, and we have just built a bigger, faster drill. It is a finite resource, yes, but we are nowhere near hitting the bottom of the barrel. I, for one, cannot wait to see what they pump out of you next.