Why Hollywood Studio Are Ignoring Cannes
Hollywood in Cannes 2026
Courtesy of THR
-
Share on Facebook
-
Share on X
-
Google Preferred
-
Share to Flipboard
-
Show additional share options
-
Share on LinkedIn
-
Share on Pinterest
-
Share on Reddit
-
Share on Tumblr
-
Share on Whats App
-
Send an Email
-
Print the Article
-
Post a Comment
There’s a tentpole-sized hole in the center of this year’s Cannes lineup. For the first time since 2017, not a single film from a major Hollywood studio will be premiering at the festival.
There will be a couple of U.S. movies — Ira Sachs’ musical fantasy The Man I Love, with Rami Malek, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger, with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller, are in competition — but those are indies. Neon is releasing Paper Tiger stateside, and The Man I Love is still looking for domestic distribution.
Related Stories
Movies
FKA twigs to Star in Josephine Baker Biopic From StudioCanal
Movies
Association of Film Commissioners Int'l, Stage 32 Launch Global Workforce Training Initiative to Address Crew Shortages
What’s missing this year is the big-ticket blockbuster, a film like Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick, or Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Warner Bros.’ Elvis, or Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, previous studio films that used a Cannes premiere as a launchpad for their global rollout.
“The U.S. will be present [at this year’s festival], the studios less [so],” said Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, announcing the lineup April 8. He ended on a defiant (and defensive) note: “When the studios are less present in Cannes, they are less present, full stop.”
Cannes has tried to paper over the studio gap this year with a Midnight Screening of The Fast and the Furious, the original race car actioner that kicked off Universal’s unstoppable franchise back in 2001. Fast stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, along with producer Neal H. Moritz and Meadow Walker, daughter of the late Paul Walker, will attend the Wednesday night screening. Elsewhere, there is a Pan’s Labyrinth anniversary screening that will bring beloved director Guillermo Del Toro to the fest.
Cannes’ sales pitch to the studios is simple: We’ll give you a combination of artistic credibility, media buzz and the world’s most glamorous red carpet. And, because the world’s film journalists are here, a Cannes premiere can double as a movie’s international junket. But the costs are substantial. For a major release, paying for travel, accommodations and security for A-list talent in this pricey Mediterranean resort town can run into seven figures. At a time when the U.S. entertainment industry is still in a period of contraction, with yet another major merger still on the horizon, Cannes is an easily expendable line item.
“It’s horribly expensive, and if you screen to thousands of journalists and the film doesn’t play well, then you have got off to the worst start possible and it probably would have been better to just junket out of a major European city and embargo reviews for the week of opening,” says one veteran publicist who has handled studio films at past Cannes.
Insiders point to the 2023 Cannes debut of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny as a prime example of what can go wrong when a big studio film bows on the Croisette. That film, the first Indiana Jones movie to hit the big screen in 15 years, had its world premiere at Cannes, where it was greeted by less-than-stellar reviews from the international press. A few years on, going to Cannes and the middling reaction that followed is seen as a misstep in that film’s marketing plan. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny topped out at the global box office with only $384 million against a $295 million pre-marketing production budget.
It isn’t just Cannes. Studios are increasingly spooked by the idea of a big festival premiere, where fickle critics, and not the in-house marketing team, provide the first impressions of a film, often months before it hits theaters. “There’s a nervousness about reviews coming out long before release and about controlling the way films of that scale are launched because there’s so much at stake,” Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle told THR ahead of this year’s studio-free Berlin fest. Tuttle traces the trend back to the 2024 Venice festival launch of Joker: Folie à Deux — Todd Phillips’ follow-up to Joker — which was swiftly trashed by festival critics and declared dead on arrival, limping its way to a meager $200 million worldwide against a reported overall budget of $300 million.
“The quickness of response in the social media age has changed things,” says Toronto Film Festival director