Hollywood Ghosts the Croisette, Queer Cinema Owns It and AI Crashes the Social gathering: 5 Takeaways From Cannes 2026

Cannes often delivers no less than one full-throttle Hollywood second. Final 12 months, Tom Cruise introduced Mission: Unattainable — The Remaining Reckoning to the Palais, the identical place he debuted Prime Gun: Maverick in 2022. This 12 months, Hollywood stayed house, with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (The Odyssey) and Steven Spielberg (Disclosure Day) preferring to fly previous the Croisette. There was not a single studio film to grace that well-known pink carpet.

It was telling that the pageant’s greatest red-carpet crowd was for a 25-year-old Common motion franchise. The midnight anniversary screening of The Quick and the Livid drew a large cheering each exterior the Palais and contained in the theater, in a celebration that brought even Vin Diesel to tears. It was a touching second, but in addition a quietly damning one for a pageant that had to return 1 / 4 century to seek out its Hollywood second.

The explanations the majors stayed house are manifold. Cannes is dear, the critics might be cruel, and the field workplace bump for a pageant premiere isn’t assured. (The Cannes launch of Mission: Impossible 8 didn’t seem to assist a lot when the movie lastly hit theaters). Warner Bros.’ success final 12 months with One Battle After One other and Sinners — two Academy Award-winning blockbusters that skipped the pageant circuit — suggests Cannes wants the studios greater than the studios want Cannes.

LGBTQ+ cinema dominated Cannes this 12 months. The largest and hottest films of the pageant centered on queer characters, themes, or views.

In competitors, Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek as a homosexual efficiency artist navigating the AIDS disaster in Eighties New York, acquired a 10-minute ovation and chatter about an awards run for the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody star.

Lukas Dhont, the Belgian filmmaker behind Woman and Shut, wowed most critics — although not The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney — with Coward, his WWI drama about queer love in the foxholes. Then there were the Javis — Spanish directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — whose La Bola Negra wove together three generations of queer men across the Spanish Civil War and beyond, which received the festival’s longest standing ovation (a reported 20 minutes) and overwhelming crucial reward.

Outdoors competitors, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer slasher Teenage Intercourse and Loss of life at Camp Miasma opened Un Sure Regard and Jordan Firstman’s Membership Child, a comedy that looks like an Adam Sandler film with medicine and dolls, was the pageant’s hottest ticket.

Ask anybody within the first week, and the Marché felt like a wake. Ask them within the ultimate days and the temper had shifted significantly. After a sluggish opening week that left many sellers observing their telephones, the Cannes Movie Market discovered one thing like a second wind in its ultimate days, with a flurry of high-profile acquisitions injecting some much-needed power into what had been a cautious, defensive Marché.

The deal that set the tone arrived early: Jordan Firstman’s Cannes breakout Membership Child offered to A24 after a heated bidding conflict, with the indie distributor paying out a reported $17 million for worldwide rights to the surprisingly candy (and almost family-friendly) comedy set within the homosexual clubbing scene.

Then got here the late surge.

Netflix picked up animated function In Waves, and, on the time of writing, is near securing home rights to pageant favourite The Black Ball (La Bola Negra) starring Penélope Cruz and Glenn Shut, and the Léa Seydoux title Mild Monster. Each seem like award performs for the streamer. Warner Bros.’ nascent specialty label Clockworks, which introduced a restored model of Ken Russell’s 1971 traditional The Devils to display in Cannes Classics, is in talks to take Park Chan-wook’s The Brigands of Rattlecreek, a revenge Western written by Bone Tomahawk author/director S. Craig Zahler and set to star Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei for North America. If it closes, it will be a big assertion of intent for the newly minted WB division.

It might not have been a classic 12 months for deal quantity however there was a way of high quality over amount and, by the shut, some hopeful indicators of inexperienced shoots for the indie movie business.

The largest drama at Cannes 2026 was off-screen and concerned a rising civil conflict between French movie business professionals and the nation’s high studio, Canal+.

On the eve of the pageant, some 600 French movie professionals, together with Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel and Swann Arlaud, signed an open letter protesting Vincent Bolloré, the right-wing media mogul who’s the main shareholder in Canal+. The letter didn’t mince phrases, calling Bolloré’s increasing French media empire — he’s already a number one drive in movie and TV manufacturing and, by means of Canal+, is planning a takeover of UGC, the nation’s third-largest theatrical exhibitor — a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”

The anti-Bolloré petition gained momentum after Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada, talking in Cannes, mentioned he would blacklist the signatories. Hundreds put their names to the open letter, including international stars like Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, Yorgos Lanthimos and Ken Loach.

By the tip of the pageant, there have been greater than 3,500 names on the petition. France’s greatest commerce union representing leisure employees has mentioned it should file a lawsuit towards Canal+ for Saada’s blacklisting risk. The audiences at Cannes screenings made their emotions clear by loudly booing the Canal+ and Studiocanal logos every time they appeared on the massive display.

With French elections subsequent 12 months and the far-right Nationwide Rally celebration anticipated to problem for the presidency, this specific French movie drama is nowhere close to its climax.

A humanoid robotic noticed marching up and down the Croisette appeared to sum up the worst AI fears of the movie business — the machines have arrived and they’re taking your house. However contained in the Palais and the market tents, the dialog over synthetic intelligence had moved past worry into one thing extra like uneasy acceptance.

Preventing AI “is a battle we will lose,” mentioned Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this 12 months, on the pageant’s opening press convention, suggesting the movie business must “find ways in which we can work with it.”

That’s not the official Cannes line. The pageant has banned movies utilizing generative synthetic intelligence from its competitors lineup. However on the Cannes movie market, and in discussions at business occasions over the previous two weeks, the tone has shifted.

AI-friendly tech large Meta signed on as an official companion to the pageant in a multiyear deal. Its AI instruments had been used to assist produce a [out of competition] pageant entry: Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. On the Marché du Movie, there was an “AI for Talent Summit” that took the AI revolution as given, focusing as an alternative on moral AI use, information sovereignty and on the methods the expertise can be utilized to boost, quite than substitute, creativity.

For the indie movie business, it felt like a turning level.