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With apparent calm, Cannes 2026 has exposed the fault lines reshaping cinema — from the evolving independent ecosystem and the decline of studio festivals to the industry’s uneasy embrace of artificial intelligence.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival was, on the surface, a more subdued edition. No studio films, fewer stars and a more impressive lineup.
But this relative calm was deceptive. Underneath, Cannes 2026 was less a showcase of immediate successes than a seismic map of independent filmmaking, revealing the shifting tectonic plates in the independent sector’s transformation, the changing role of studios on the festival circuit, and the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence across production and marketing. What happened on the Croisette was not a noise, but a signal.
Hollywood stayed home, and everyone noticed
Image source: Hoda Davin/Getty Images for Universal Pictures Cannes usually offers at least one full-blown Hollywood moment. Last year, he brought in Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning To the palace, the same place where he first appeared Top Gun: Maverick In 2022. This year, Hollywood has stayed home, with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (Odyssey(And Steven Spielberg)Disclosure day) preferring to fly via the Croisette. There wasn’t a single studio film to grace that famous red carpet.
The biggest red carpet crowd at the festival was clearly for the 25-year-old Universal Action franchise. Midnight Anniversary Show for The fast and the furious It sparked huge cheers outside the palace and inside the theatre, in a celebration that made even Vin Diesel cry. It was a poignant moment, but also a quiet condemnation of a festival that had to go back a quarter of a century to find its Hollywood moment.
The reasons why big companies stay at home are multiple. Cannes is expensive, critics can be merciless, and the box office revenues of a festival premiere are never guaranteed. (Launching of the Cannes Film Festival Mission Impossible 8 It didn’t seem to help much when the movie finally hit theaters.) Warner Bros. Success last year with Battle after battle and Sinners — two Oscar-winning films that skipped the festival circuit — suggest that Cannes needs the studios more than the studios need Cannes.
It was the old gay Cannes festival
Image credit: Cannes Film Festival LGBTQ+ cinema dominated Cannes this year. The festival’s biggest and most popular films focused on strange characters, themes, or viewpoints.
In competition, Ira Sachs The man I loveThe film, starring Rami Malek as a gay artist navigating the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, received a 10-minute standing ovation and buzz around the Oscar-winning film’s awards ceremony. bohemian rhapsody star.
Lukas Dhont, Belgian director Girl and Closesimpressed most critics – even if not Hollywood ReporterDavid Rooney – with cowarda World War I drama about strange love in the trenches. Then there was Javis – the Spanish directing duo of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrosi – who… La Pola Negra Weaving together three generations of gay men through the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, it received the festival’s longest standing ovation (almost 20 minutes) and overwhelming critical praise.
Out of competition is the eccentric character of Jean Schönbrunn Teen sex and death in Miasma camp Uncertain Regard and Jordan Firstman’s opened Kid ClubThe comedy, which sounds like an Adam Sandler movie with drugs and puppets, was the festival’s biggest hit.
The market started slow, then recovered
Image credit: Cannes Film Festival Ask anyone the first week, and it felt like the market had woken up. Ask them in recent days and the mood has changed dramatically. After a slow opening week that left many sellers staring at their phones, the Cannes film market has found something of a second wind in its final days, with a wave of high-profile acquisitions injecting some much-needed energy into a market that had been cautious and defensive.
The deal that set the tone arrived early: Jordan Verstmann’s debut at Cannes Kid Club It was sold to A24 after a heated bidding war, with the independent distributor paying $17 million for the world rights to the brilliant (and almost family-friendly) comedy set in the gay club scene.
Then came the late boom.
Netflix has picked up the animated feature In wavesand at the time of writing, is on the verge of securing the local rights to the festival favourite Black ball (La Pola Negra) Starring Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close, and starring Léa Seydoux Gentle monster. Both sound like plays for broadcast awards. Warner Bros. Emerging niche label Clockworks, which brought a restored edition of Ken Russell’s 1971 classic Devils To be screened at Cannes Classics, Park Chan Wook is in talks to take on the film Bandits from RattlecreekWestern Revenge by Bone tomahawk Writer/director S. Craig Zahler is set to star Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal, and Tang Wei in North America. If it closes, it will be an important statement of intent for the newly minted World Bank division.
This may not have been a banner year for the volume of deals, but there was a sense of quality over quantity, and by the close there were some hopeful signs of green shoots for independent filmmaking.
The French are angry with Bolloré and Canal+
Image source: Magali Cohen/Hans Lukas/AFP via Getty Images The biggest drama at Cannes 2026 was off-screen, and involved a growing civil war between French film industry professionals and the country’s largest studio, Canal+.
On the eve of the festival, some 600 French film professionals, including Juliette Binoche, Adele Haenel and Swan Arlaud, signed an open letter in protest against Vincent Bolloré, the right-wing media mogul and major shareholder of Canal+. The letter did not mince words, calling Bolloré’s expanding French media empire — he is already a leading force in film and television production, and through Canal+ plans to take over UGC, the country’s third-largest theatrical exhibitor — “a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”
The anti-Boloré petition gained momentum after Canal+ CEO Maxime Saade, speaking in Cannes, said he would blacklist the signatories. Thousands put their names to the open letter, including international stars such as Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, Yorgos Lanthimos and Ken Loach.
By the end of the festival, there were more than 3,500 names on the petition. France’s largest trade union representing entertainment workers said it would file a lawsuit against Canal+ over Saada’s threat to blacklist it. The audience has crossed paths Cannes made its feelings clear by loudly booing the Canal+ and Studiocanal logos as they appeared on the big screen.
With French elections next year and the far-right National Rally party expected to compete for the presidency, this French cinematic drama in particular is nowhere near its peak.
AI exists, and the industry has stopped pretending otherwise
Image credit: Kishin Shinoyama The human-like robot, which was spotted walking up and down the Croisette, seems to sum up the worst fears of artificial intelligence in the film industry: machines have arrived and are taking your place. But inside the palace and market tents, the conversation about artificial intelligence has moved beyond fear to something more like uneasy acceptance.
Fighting AI is “a battle we are going to lose,” Demi Moore, a member of this year’s Cannes jury, said at the festival’s opening press conference, noting that the film industry needs to “find ways in which we can work with it.”
This is not the official line of Cannes. The festival has banned films that use generative artificial intelligence from its competition list. But at the Cannes Film Market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has changed.
Meta, the AI-friendly technology giant, has signed an official partner of the festival in a multi-year deal. Its artificial intelligence tools were used to help produce the [out of competition] Festival entry: Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Final Interview. In the film market, there was an “AI for Talent Summit” that took the AI revolution for granted, focusing instead on the ethical use of AI, data sovereignty, and on ways in which technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity.
For the independent film industry, it seemed like a turning point.
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