Public film money, country by country

Where Creative Europe's development money goes

The European Union pays producers to develop films, series and games before a camera rolls. This page opens the Commission's own books on that money: every development grant of the MEDIA sub-programme since the programme began, who got it, in which country, for what, and how much. Pick a year and a scheme, click a country, or look up a company.

EUR 0 in development grants

Every country

CountryAwardsEUR

A register for every country

One small book per country: the money its companies won in each year of the programme, for the scheme chosen above. The tallest bar in each register is that country's best year. Open a register to read its companies in the ledger.

What a grant is worth

The schemes pay very different sums. A slate grant funds three to five projects at once and is the largest development award a producer can win from the programme; a single project or a mini-slate pays for one or two scripts to be written and packaged. Co-development splits one grant between partners in different countries, so each share is small. TV and online content is production money rather than development money, and its grants are the biggest of all. The line in each strip is the typical award, the middle grant of the scheme.

Year by year

The first programme ran from 2014 to 2020 with four schemes. The second, from 2021, replaced single projects with mini-slates and co-development, turned television support into TV and online content, and let games and immersive works in from its second year. The bars stack the schemes; the latest year holds only the grants signed so far.

The companies that come back

Development support is not a lottery. The same production houses return year after year, a slate grant one year and a TV series or a co-development the next. The register below lists the most frequent winners, counting a company once however the Commission spelled its name.

Whose share grew, whose shrank

Each country's slice of the money in the first three years of the programme against the last three complete years. The second programme set money aside for countries with a smaller audiovisual market, through the mini-slate scheme, and the United Kingdom left after 2020, so the map has shifted. The lines run from the early share to the late one.

About the data

What is counted

Every grant of the Creative Europe MEDIA sub-programme's content schemes: Slate Funding and Single Project development, TV Programming and Video Games under the 2014 to 2020 programme; European slate development, mini-slate development, co-development, TV and online content, and video games and immersive content development under the programme that began in 2021. Distribution, festivals, training, markets and the other MEDIA actions are not here. An award is one beneficiary's share of one grant, so a co-developed project with three partners is three awards in three countries.

Where it comes from

The 2014 to 2020 grants come from the European Commission's Financial Transparency System, the yearly record of every beneficiary of the EU budget that the Commission manages directly, filtered to the MEDIA budget line and read scheme by scheme from the subject of each grant. The grants from 2021 on come from the project records of the Funding and Tenders Portal, call by call, with each partner's country and share. Both are Commission content, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 by the Commission's reuse notice (Decision 2011/833/EU). The coastlines are drawn from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.

How to read it

  • Years are the year the Commission booked the grant for 2014 to 2020 and the year of the call from 2021 on. A round decided in the spring is usually signed the same year.
  • Amounts are the EU contribution written into the grant agreement, not what was finally paid.
  • Partners of a grant that the record does not split are given equal shares, and those rows carry a tilde in the ledger.
  • Countries are where the beneficiary is registered. A partner listed with no share of the money is left out.
  • TV and online content funds production, not development; it is here because it is the other way the programme pays producers for series and films.
  • Two national funds were considered and left out: the British Film Institute's award lists and the CNC's commission results are published without a reuse licence.

Download the data (CSV)

The counts, totals and shares on this page are free to reuse with a link to it, under CC BY 4.0, like the Commission's records they come from. Spotted a company in the wrong place? Tell us and we will fix it. Updated from the Commission's records.

Scriptopus is not connected with the European Commission or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency, and neither has endorsed this page.

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