The Cannes 2026 lineup confirms Hollywood’s surrender to the algorithm
The Cannes Film Festival has cultivated a sense of glamour throughout its nearly eight-decade history, feeding hungry audiences a steady stream of footage of movie stars cavorting on the sunny beaches of Southern France or gliding across the red carpet in haute couture.
Until recently, it was the most coveted place for major Hollywood studios to premiere their films, from ET: The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 to Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood in 2020. But when the lineup was announced for the 2026 iteration of the festival, there was a conspicuous absence of big-budget studio movies.
Of the 22 films that will premiere in the ‘In Competition’ category, only one – Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love – hails from the United States, and it is guaranteed to be decidedly anti-blockbuster. Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut Club Kid will premiere in the Un Certain Regard section, while Andy Garcia’s Diamond will appear Out of Competition. John Travolta’s directorial debut will screen in the Cannes Premiere section, while the documentaries John Lennon: The Last Interview, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and Avedon, directed by Ron Howard, appear in the Special Screenings section. None of these are expected to be major commercial releases.
Meanwhile, the movies that are expected to fill cinemas this year are nowhere to be found. Universal’s Disclosure Day, directed by Steven Spielberg, will not be at Cannes, nor will Warner Bros’ Digger, directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu and starring Tom Cruise, whose Top Gun: Maverick premiered at the festival in 2022. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is also absent, as is Disney’s Toy Story 5, even though other animated hits such as Up, Inside Out, and Kung Fu Panda were introduced to audiences there in previous years.
At first glance, it might seem like this is a sign that the festival is throwing all its cards on the table in favour of the sort of international and independent films that have made it one of the key predictors of the Oscars in recent years. Palme D’Or winners Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall, and Anora all went on to win ‘Best Picture’, while last year’s Grand Prix winner Sentimental Value won ‘Best International Feature’. But upon closer inspection, it turns out the absence of big-budget Hollywood movies has a lot more to do with the studios’ increasing fear of a bad premiere.
In 2024, Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux premiered at Venice with disastrous results. The musical follow-up to the director’s hit 2019 comic book movie was panned and went on to haemorrhage money at the box office. Other studio-backed blockbuster hopefuls received slightly better reviews but suffered upon their release, including Kevin Costner’s disastrous Horizon: An American Saga and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
If you wanted to get logical about it, you could point out that these movies almost certainly failed at the box office because they were bad and no one liked them, not because critics gave them poor reviews. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, it is no longer a risk worth taking. Why let critics have the first say when you could just put Timothée Chalamet on the mic with Theo Vonn or plaster the title of his upcoming movie on the side of a blimp?
Movie marketing has changed drastically since the days when Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, and Jack Black cruised into Cannes on an inflatable shark to drum up enthusiasm for Shark Tale in 2004, or when Sacha Baron Cohen galloped onto the red carpet astride a camel for 2012’s The Dictator. Now, it’s all about social media virality. Those Cannes stunts could grab the attention of potential ticket buyers, but why bother even having a premiere when you could simply pay TikTok creators to hype the film before they’ve seen it or dress Margot Robbie in pink for five months?
Occasionally, this type of marketing pays off. Last year, Ryan Coogler’s mega-hit Sinners skipped the festival circuit and went straight to cinemas. Shortly before its release, a video was published on Kodak’s YouTube channel in which the director gave a ten-minute masterclass on the differences between film formats and aspect ratios. It was a substantive lesson that was accessible to movie nerds and casual cinema-goers alike, and it managed to avoid plot spoilers without being nauseatingly shallow or unconnected with the film it was promoting. It currently has over one million views on YouTube.
In most cases, though, this type of marketing backfires. You could even argue that Chalamet’s relentless self-promotion and fashion stunts during the press tour for Marty Supreme cost him the Oscar. Perhaps if they’d simply let the film premiere at Cannes to rapturous reviews, he might have been taken more seriously. Then again, maybe the same lesson applies to this type of stunt marketing as it does to the box office failures of Folie à Deux and Megalopolis: if the film or performance isn’t good enough, no amount of podcast interviews will save you. In other words, Michael B Jordan simply deserved to win.
The trouble with this new version of movie marketing is that audiences will find out one way or another whether a film is any good. The only difference between whether they hear about it through Cannes reviews or through evasive and viral social media marketing is the degree to which they will feel lied to once they finally see it. In fact, there is a case to be made that one of the reasons Folie à Deux was met with such vitriol from audiences is because its marketing seemed allergic to any associations with the musical genre, not its relatively poor reviews from Venice.
There are reasons to question whether the deadline-driven opinions of a handful of sleep-deprived, movie-saturated critics should dictate how the public is introduced to a film, but if the success of the Avengers movies is anything to go by, no one really cares what critics have to say anyway. Turning to gaudy social media stunts that are increasingly detached from their source material surely can’t be the solution to Hollywood’s financial woes, can it?
