All for two and two for all: why a bisexual twist can’t rescue The Three Musketeers

Suitably honouring the spirit of Alexandre Dumas, the second half of the new two-part Three Musketeers film adaptation arrives with not one but two cliffhangers to resolve. First, there’s the fate of D’Artagnan’s lady-love, kidnapped by Milady’s goons after the attempted assassination of Louis XIII. And second, there’s the question of whether this would-be Euro blockbuster is actually going to make its money back.

Co-produced by France, Germany, Spain and Belgium on a €72m budget across both instalments – putting it in the top 10 most expensive French productions ever – the films looked well provisioned to compete with Hollywood: big names such as Eva Green and Vincent Cassel, copious buckling of swashes and modernising tweaks such as a bisexual Porthos all gaily buttonhole the new version. But it has struggled, with this April’s first part bombing in the UK and Germany while, surprisingly, mustering a just-respectable €23m on home soil in France.

Maybe it was the post-pandemic hangover, but it’s the latest sad chapter in the history of the European blockbuster. The last major European attempt to mount a film designed to stride majestically across borders was probably Luc Besson’s 2017 sci-fi Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which struggled to break into profit on its galactic $200m budget. Not having a unified domestic market speaking a single language, such as Hollywood has as its first port of call, such undertakings are inherently risky.

Besson’s EuropaCorp studio was the main European outfit focused on mass-market films, such as the Taxi and Taken franchises. But Valerian holed it beneath the waterline, and it is currently listing under heavy debt. There have been sporadic “breakouts” into mainstream global territory from little-films-that-can such as Amélie, Life Is Beautiful and The Lives of Others. Then there are local mega-hits and even franchises that, if they’re lucky, travel a little, such as 2011’s Intouchables or the live-action Astérix films. Since 2000, Hollywood has been encroaching on this territory, funding “local” hits such as 2007’s The Orphanage in Spain, or 2011’s The Artist in France. But the genuine all-for-one and one-for-all pan-European blockbuster is rarer than a Viktor Orbán compliment about Brussels.

Now, the infrastructure and the expertise to create big-scale European productions have almost died out, resulting in a self-unfulfilling lack of ambition, says Jean-Jacques Annaud. The French director was forced to go to Paramount in the US to get the $70m needed to make his European-crewed 2001 blockbuster Enemy at the Gates, a sniper drama set during the Battle of Stalingrad. “There are no longer many people who know how to make big films in Europe, there are fewer and fewer who want to make them, and there’s a fragmentation of audiences which means there’s no longer that stock we once had of European stars of international or pan-European renown,” he says, thinking back to the likes of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon.

So last weekend’s European film awards were dominated by arthouse fare produced by siloed national film industries, or more modest collaborations: the likes of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (French) or Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (UK/Poland/US). Mike Downey, producer and chairman of the European Film Academy, points out that “European” blockbusters do still exist in the form of films that have creative origins here but are Hollywood-financed, such as the Harry Potter series.

“But,” adds Downey, “if we are referring to the now outdated idea of the late, unlamented Europudding – the pan-European cinematic versions of Eurovision that graced and often disgraced our big screens in the 80s and 90s – then that kind of cross-border big-budget production is dead. Very often, many contributions of the genre were like certain cheap wines, and should carry a government warning, ‘Product of more than one country.’ I should know, I have been responsible for one or two in my time.” He cites his own Bathory: Countess of Blood, from 2008, starring Anna Friel as a 16th-century Hungarian serial killer.

There is an alternative version of cinema history in which the first world war never happened and the French film industry – the main player at the time – didn’t suffer this catastrophic interruption that allowed Hollywood to catch up. As it was, the prevailing style of the respective industries on either side of the Atlantic rapidly bifurcated, explains Annaud. “Because the United States was taking in more and more immigrants, it needed films for viewers who didn’t necessarily speak English. So American cinema was forced to make films with action and visuals. France kept the market for more sophisticated films.”

That was the beginning of the mainstream/arthouse split that, as the decades have advanced, has shunted the European industries, unable to outgun Hollywood, into production of socially orientated cinema. Often, as in France, such works are state-subsidised – leading to what Annaud views as a culture of settling and complacency. He says European film-makers are incentivised to box-tick localised criteria, like shooting in native languages, rather than envisage more ambitious work targeting audiences further afield: “It’s a sin to make a successful film. It’s better to make an honourable failure, one with social significance that shines in the eyes of your peers.” Asked around the time he made Seven Years in Tibet to give a talk at Paris’s Fémis film school, he found someone had defaced his poster with red graffiti spelling out: “Annaud = succès = danger.”

Hopefully, we have evolved from such kneejerk bad faith – but the broader European cinematic landscape suggests not. Downey, however, believes that chasing the white whale of the blockbuster is the wrong approach, and that Europe’s nationally distinct cinema is producing enough quality work. The problem is getting people to see it, especially post-pandemic. “A crucial contribution we can make is to help take European cinema beyond the arthouses and into mainstream cinemas alongside more commercial films,” he says. “This kind of cross-fertilisation can only be of help to our European artists. Cinema today is an important contributor to cultural identities that are more inclusive, more multicultural and multi-ethnic, more able to embrace the ‘new Europe’.”

In 2026, the European film awards will move from early December to mid-January, right into the awards season corridor, to fight harder for that visibility. The all-for-one ideal isn’t quite dead yet.

• The Three Musketeers: Milady is released on 15 December.