Lisbon: The Creative Europe MEDIA strand has reopened its Networks of European Cinemas call with a submission deadline of 18 June, and the application volume on the Funding and Tenders Portal has been climbing as Europe’s smaller cinema operators line up to test a redrawn evaluation grid that gives noticeably more weight to audience-engagement plans and noticeably less to raw screening volume.
The call sits inside the wider 35th anniversary cycle of the MEDIA strand, which has been positioned in recent communications as a moment to recalibrate the support architecture toward the medium and small operators that handle the longer tail of European film distribution rather than the multiplex chains that already command most of the screen real estate. The Networks call is the one that pays for the operating overhead of a transnational cinema network, including its programming staff, its joint marketing campaigns, and the audience-development work that nudges local audiences toward non-national European films.
The biggest change in the 2026 round is the filter on programming. The minimum share of non-national European films that a member cinema must screen has moved up, while the credit given to repeat screenings of the same title has moved down, a change designed to push exhibitors toward a wider rotation of titles and to lift the visibility of films from smaller European markets that struggle to break into commercial distribution. Networks have responded by drafting new agreements with their member cinemas to share the cost of acquiring the additional title catalogue.
A second adjustment runs on the audience side. The 2026 call gives more weight to projects that show concrete engagement plans for younger viewers, with the evaluation grid rewarding work that brings school-age audiences into cinema halls and that builds steady programming pipelines for under-25 viewers. The reasoning runs through both cultural-policy and commercial logic, with the medium-term decline of theatrical attendance in the under-25 demographic flagged across both the Commission’s audiovisual report and the trade press as the most urgent risk to the wider European cinema ecosystem.
Operators have flagged two friction points in the new design. The first is the sustainability requirement, which asks networks to file a plan for reducing the environmental footprint of their operations, with reporting on energy consumption, projection equipment lifecycle and audience travel patterns. Smaller networks have argued that the reporting overhead is heavy for the staff base they run, and have asked the Commission’s executive agency for lighter templates. The second is the inclusion criteria, which now require networks to demonstrate active programming for audiences with sensory or mobility access requirements.
The funding envelope has not been increased in headline terms, which means more emphasis on the quality of the application than on the volume of resources flowing through. Past evaluation cycles have produced success rates in the mid-twenties percentage range for the Networks line, and operators expect that level to hold rather than tighten in this round.
Sitting alongside the Networks call, the European Film Distribution scheme remains the bigger ticket in the MEDIA strand’s exhibition support and runs on a separate calendar that closes in April. The Cinema Networks line covers the network-level work; the Film Distribution line covers the acquisition and release activity that puts individual titles into specific markets. Together the two schemes carry the bulk of the support that flows toward the theatrical part of the European audiovisual chain.
Awards for the 2026 Networks round are expected to be communicated to applicants in the autumn, with funded agreements signed before the end of the year.
