Class war at the multiplex: the British film boom belongs to America

The smartest films of the British season are, one after another, about the same subject: money, and who is denied it. As Westminster argues over wealth taxes and the "class war" reputedly fought behind them, the country's directors have caught up, sending heroes from the estates of the north to fight landlords, bosses and the state. It is tempting to call this culture doing its natural job. The statistics tell a stranger story: a record production boom that is mostly American money, a cinema in retreat from its own audience, and a tax subsidy designed to save a "distinctly British" industry that arithmetic cannot rescue.

Consider the boom, as measured by the British Film Institute. In 2025 film and high-end television production spend reached £6.8bn, up 22% on 2024 and the third-highest figure on record; the £2.77bn spent on feature films alone was the highest since records began in 2002. This is the background against which ministers and the culture committee fret about losing British stories. Yet look at who pays. Some 85% of the total, £5.8bn, is "inward investment" — films financed and controlled from Los Angeles, shot in London studios because Britain offers stages, crews and a tax credit at net 25.5% of qualifying spend. The genuinely local films that so worry the committee amounted to £193m, or about 7% of film spend. The class-war cinema is a small, proud sideshow to an industrial park staffed by Americans: Avengers: Doomsday, Supergirl, the Beatles project.

The state did not ignore the problem. To keep a British flavour in a global business, it invented a richer credit for small films. From April 2025, features with budgets under £15m and a UK lead writer or director can claim an enhanced Audio Visual Expenditure Credit at a gross rate of 53%, worth a net 39.75% against the standard 25.5%. The intent is admirable: subsidise the supply of a culture that the market would otherwise undersupply. The trouble is that the binding constraint was never money to make the films, but the means to sell them. Box-office takings fell a fifth below their pre-pandemic level in 2025 even as production spend hit records; admissions, at 123.5m, were 30% below 2019. Seventeen of the twenty biggest hits were sequels or franchises; British independent films held a shrinking 6.8% share of the box office. A credit can fill a shooting schedule; it cannot manufacture an audience.

It therefore matters greatly where the money actually lands, which tells an investor where the rents are. The subsidy's largest beneficiaries are the global platforms and studios that now dominate British stages, and the owners of the physical plant those productions need. Downstream, in exhibition, the one UK chain in growth — Everyman — got there by being a restaurant with a screen, lifting revenue 21% in the first half of 2025 on £47 bottles of rosé and smash burgers rather than on ticket demand. Even that escape hatch is closing: by mid-2026 the chain faced competition and loss-making sites under a new turnaround chief. For the more conventional cinema operators, the market is unimpressed: AInvest's aggregate signal labels AMC, which owns the Odeon chain in Britain, a Hold, with a fundamental rating of 1.65 out of ten.

Strip out the politics and the trade-off is plain. The taxpayer, agitated about the survival of a national culture, subsidises the supply of that culture while the returns flow to the studios that do not need the subsidy and to a filmed-entertainment business that is quietly shrinking. The class-war film is a real cultural event and a poor market one. Most American investors already own the genuine beneficiary of the record boom — the streaming and studio giants that make it — as a matter of course. Owning "British cinema" itself means owning a different thing: an exhibition business in structural decline, or a boutique operator whose growth has been priced as dining and is now contested.

There is nothing ignoble about a government that spends on art it believes the market undervalues. But it should spend on what reaches audiences, not on more supply of a product it cannot distribute. A politics that taxes wealth in the name of fairness and subsidises films in the name of culture will keep producing angry cinema and empty multiplexes. It is worth remembering which of those two is the better business.