Charles Rivkin sat down with Emmanuel Macron and Lee Jae Myung as Hollywood's trade body committed to a fresh push against piracy and for cross-border film cooperation.
The Motion Picture Association put its name to two international declarations on Monday at the Lumière Summit in France, the kind of paperwork that rarely makes headlines but tends to shape how the film business actually operates for the next decade.
The first is the Lumière Declaration on the Future of Cinema and the Moving Image. The second commits signatories to strengthened international cooperation against film and audiovisual piracy, a fight the MPA has been waging for years through its Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment coalition. Both were signed alongside governments and private-sector partners from around the world, according to Deadline and Variety.
The summit itself was co-chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, which tells you something about where the industry's growth conversations are happening right now. Not just Los Angeles. Paris and Seoul got equal billing.
MPA chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin used the occasion to sit in on two separate business roundtables, one with each president, both stacked with MPA member studio CEOs. The Lee session focused on deepening ties with Korea's creative sector, still riding the wave K-content has generated globally. The Macron session covered the same ground but for France.
"Our industry is fueled by a simple proposition: audiences love great stories, well told," Rivkin said, per both outlets. "From the U.S. To France to Korea and beyond, we each have a stake in ensuring that our industry remains a force for openness, a source of investment, and a driver of jobs, growth, and opportunity. This summit proved a vital forum to translate that common ground into greater cooperation."
Emilie Anthonis, who runs the MPA's Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, took the piracy conversation further at a session titled "The Race Against Piracy: A Global Challenge." She walked through what ACE has been doing to tackle content theft that doesn't respect borders, and welcomed the summit's framing of IP protection as central to keeping the creative economy funded, per Variety's report.
Worth noting who's actually on the hook here. The MPA's member studios are Netflix, Paramount, Amazon MGM Studios and Prime Video, Sony Pictures, Universal, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, a roster that between them touch every major streaming platform Indian audiences use daily. Piracy enforcement pacts signed in Saint-Paul-de-Vence don't stay confined to France. ACE has gone after mirror sites and illegal streaming operations well beyond Europe before, and a renewed global commitment usually means renewed pressure everywhere, including markets where pirated Hindi and regional releases circulate within hours of a theatrical drop.
What none of Monday's statements spell out is a timeline for enforcement action or specifics on how signatories will coordinate beyond the declaration text. That detail, if it comes, will likely surface through ACE's own case filings rather than another summit photo-op.
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