Hollywood had better things to do than party on the Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
With the movie business in disarray, none of the big studios, not Disney, Universal, Amazon MGM, Sony nor Paramount and its fiancé Warner Bros, were there. The biggest of them all, Netflix, is effectively blocked from the festival because it does not generally release its movies in theaters. (The streaming giant’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos’s promises to release more movies theatrically withered when Warner Bros decided to marry Paramount instead of Netflix.)
Cannes has always been a mix of high and low. The highbrow films — often European but also American independents — compete to win the top festival prize, the Palme d’Or.
But usually Cannes has also featured a big studio movie or two because that served both the festival and Hollywood. The festival needs American star power to draw the world’s attention, and the celebrities showing up to be photographed on the famous red carpet keep the global media beast fed.
Last year, “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning” screened without being an official competition entrant. (The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi won the Palme d’Or for “It Was Just an Accident.”) Tom Cruise and Angela Bassett strutted the red carpet.
This year has fewer movie stars, fewer oligarch megayachts in the bay, fewer parties and ever more desperate paparazzi. In the absence of traditional celluloid celebrity, influencers in full evening wear took up a lot of space on the narrow sidewalks leading to the famed red carpeted stairs.
Is this a Franco American breakup? Who walked out on whom? To some it feels like this is one more way that America, under President Trump, has turned its back on the rest of the world.
A frustrated festival chief finally addressed the topic at the introduction of one of the few American entries in one of the main competitions, “Club Kid” by Jordan Firstman.
“There are American films here,” the artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, said from the stage with more than a hint of defensiveness, citing reports to the contrary. “American independent cinema is here.”
The first time I came to Cannes, in 1991, Madonna was everywhere. “Madonna: Truth or Dare” was the ticket everyone wanted, the party where you had to get in.
And the streets were impassable once more in 1994 when Quentin Tarantino showed up with “Pulp Fiction.” John Travolta (who got a lifetime achievement award this year) and Uma Thurman caused a near riot on the red carpet.
More recently, Cannes became a place for the debut of Oscar-seeking movies. Apple brought Martin Scorsese’s epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” in 2023. Months ahead of the fall awards season, the specialty divisions of major studios like Universal’s Focus Features and Disney’s Searchlight Pictures brought such films as Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness” (Searchlight) in 2024 and Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme”(Focus) last year.
But bringing films to Cannes is both expensive and risky. As one marketer from a specialty division told me, the festival is too early in the year to sustain any positive buzz for awards season. And it can derail release plans if the buzz is bad.
There are exceptions. “Club Kid,” about a gay, druggie party promoter who gets stuck with an unexpected son, was bought by the independent studio A24 for a relatively rich $17 million. And the indie studio Neon was out in force, with nine films playing in this year’s festival, including the Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” the Korean auteur Na Hong-jin’s “Hope” and James Gray’s “Paper Tiger.”
Neon has a remarkable collection of Palme d’Or winners that began their journeys in Cannes and continued on a glide path all the way to the Oscars. They include “It Was Just an Accident,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Titane” and the best picture winners “Parasite” and “Anora.”
Distributors from the other specialty divisions told me they are here watching films but not planning to buy much, if anything. The economics of art-house movies are rough and getting rougher. Small distributors find they cannot get post-theatrical deals that used to be available from Netflix and Amazon, which is critical to wringing every dollar from the life cycle of a film. Netflix and Amazon are no longer interested in bulking up their huge libraries with art-house fare; that’s not the business they are in. So the indies are stuck with a broken business model and no one has found a way to fix it.
“We are fiddling while Rome is burning,” one art house distributor said to me, after doing calculations that meant he could not bid on “Club Kid.”
Studio executives tell me that they aren’t dying to risk their big budget projects on whether a bunch of snooty Europeans want to give them a standing ovation. With people finally returning to the theaters to see “Michael” and “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the industry’s focus is instead on getting back to where the box office was before the pandemic.
That means, no matter how chic — throwing a party at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc can make anyone feel like an old-school mogul — Cannes is a risk to box office word of mouth that an anxious industry simply doesn’t need.
Sharon Waxman is the founder, chief executive and editor in chief of The Wrap.
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