The Oscars have found in a new home in France.
Disney+ has picked up exclusive broadcast rights for the 97th Academy Awards, and will offer French subscribers access to the red carpet and the ceremony live from the Dolby Theater on March 2.
Up until this year, French pay-tv service Canal+ held the exclusive license, often organizing marathon late night broadcasts that accented French talent and ran into the early hours of the morning.
Indeed, local interest has significantly expanded in recent years, once Gallic sons like “The Father” director Florian Zeller stepped into the limelight and as French-remakes like “CODA” bounded towards the best picture podium. Zeller even accepted his Academy Award for best adapted screenplay from the Canal+ broadcast studio in Paris.
If anything, that public interest reached a fever pitch once Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” scored across the board nominations and even a win best original screenplay earlier this year, and that pace should only keep up should Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez” put in an even stronger showing come 2025.
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Disney+ has not announced additional broadcast plans for the ceremony hosted by Conan O’Brien and set to air on March 2, 2025.
Disney execs made the announcement at a 2025 preview held in Paris on Tuesday.
At the same event, execs teased upcoming series like “Paradise,” starring Sterling K. Brown and created by Dan Fogelman (“This is Us”); “Dying for Sex,” starring Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate and Sissy Spacek; and “The Lost Station Girls,” a true-crime thriller about a two-decades-long inquiry into the murders of four young women, toplined by “Emily in Paris” star Camille Razat.
Disney execs also announced a brand new French original, “Surveiller et punir” (a name that plays as a wink to the French title of Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”). Described as a workplace comedy about a pair of prison guards, the series comes courtesy of “Simply Black” creators John Wax and Jean-Pascal Zadi.