Russian movie studios expect the market to shrink by 50% due to lack of import substitution

This state of affairs is evidenced, for example, in the explanatory note to the financial statements of the film studio M. Gorky, which was reviewed by RBC.

“Import substitution in the production of equipment and software for film production is a process that can take years and even decades and is extremely relevant for the film industry,” Andrey Danilin, deputy general director of the acquisition studio, notes in the document. .

For a year of existence in the sanctions regime, even despite state support (the Ministry of Culture distributed more than 10 billion rubles), it was not possible to get out of dependence on imported equipment. According to the general director of Mosfilm, Karen Shakhnazarov, it is “almost one hundred percent.”

All this, together with the drop in the box office, causes a reduction in the film market. Some experts are sure that twice (Andrey Danilin thinks so). But not all representatives of the film industry are so dramatic.

Fedor Shcherbakov, General Director of Lenfilm, emphasizes: “Today there are opportunities to buy equipment in friendly countries and use parallel imports for consumables.”

The problem of import substitution is most acute for creators of animation products, since there is a dependency not only on technology, but also on software.

“If we talk about high-quality 3D animation, then the drop in production volumes can reach 70-80%, since the necessary software packages will be disabled and updates will simply stop coming,” says Vladimir Nikolaev, general producer. from the Voronezh animation studio (formerly Wizart Animation).