Whose Lost Bullet? Netflix, Cultural Politics and the Branding of French Action Cinema

Abstract

AbstractThe recent appearance of French-language action films on Netflix should be seen as an extension of industrial reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, when action cinema—historically neglected in France—found a home at studios like StudioCanal and EuropaCorp. Netflix has expanded that game, producing and acquiring a flurry of Franco-European content while making its ‘stack’ menus host to a new, sliding game of cultural and generic indexing. Using the recent Netflix film Lost Bullet (Pierret, 2020) as a case study, this chapter proposes a schema for thinking through how postnational French popular culture combines North American genre conventions with Franco-European cultural inputs.