This year, the Mediterrane Film Festival returned to Malta for its fourth edition. While it requires a village to make a successful festival, the MFF is very much the vision of the dynamic Johann Grech, Malta Film Commissioner since 2018. This year, as before, the festival finished with the Golden Bee Awards, held at Malta Film Studios on 28 June 2026. Hosted for the first time by British comedian Jack Whitehall, the spectacular show played out on Malta’s famed water tanks, featuring a 100-meter-long stage with a stunning 60-meter-wide projection screen made of water. 

Several days earlier, Celluloid Junkie sat down with Grech, who was bursting with excitement about the festival and the upcoming show. “It is a message to the world… that our country, [despite] being so small, it never stops us of dreaming big. And the show with the water tank is going to be a bold statement.” ‘Bold’, it certainly was. As Leona Lewis, Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja and Eurovision favourite Destiny entertained the VIP guests, winners included John Cleese, who was presented with the Icon award, and Andy Harries, producer of “The Crown,” who received a lifetime achievement award. Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers” won Best Feature Film and Best Screenwriting, for Ed Solomon.

“The festival [has] kept on growing,” says Grech. “We kept on investing, and it kept on growing, and it’s leading us to results.” Each year, he notes, there has been an expansion, with the festival throwing its doors ever wider. “The third year, last year, we opened it for the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean, and this year we opened it for all global nations. So America, Australia, Canada, Europe, the Mediterranean. Malta was always strategic in our history. We were always strategic. And we want this festival to be as strategic as Malta itself to get business here to participate on the global stage, to build up this brand and keep on competing.”

Certainly the inclusion of films like the Australian-made survival tale “Beast of War” in the festival line-up has given the selection a more international sheen. But the MFF has a distinct purpose beyond simply serving up great cinema for the public. “I think it’s the best marketing tool, as the Film Commission, we ever created for the film industry,” says Grech. “Not just for debate or networking… but also for potential co-production. It’s a business tool, a strategic tool to get more business to Malta, putting Malta on the global map. We are inviting producers, directors, studio executives, filmmakers, press to feel it in a tangible way, our product.”

The hugely ambitious Grech has been scheming to make Malta an attractive destination for filmmakers for the best part of a decade now. “We have been always successful in getting [filmmakers here to shoot their] stories, but the industry was seasonal. When I became commissioner, I wasn’t happy about the status quo. Are you happy with 200 people working only for a very short period of time? No. And today we have over 1800 people working in film, mostly the majority working all year round, from one production to another.”

Since the launch of a 40% cash rebate scheme in 2018, one of the most competitive in Europe, the industry has generated EUR €1.5 billion (USD $1.71 billion) in gross value added for the Maltese economy. An independent study, written by the chief officer for economics at the Central Bank of Malta, revealed that since the rebate was initiated, the tax revenues generated by film activity have far exceeded the cost of the rebates. Among other things, the study discovered that the net fiscal benefit to the Malta government amounted to EUR €94 million (USD $107.1 million) between 2018 and 2025. After the period between 2005 to 2017, it marks a four-fold increase, from around EUR €3 million (USD $3.42) to EUR $12 million (USD $1.367) annually. 

“For every one euro that we invest with, the industry generates four back,” Grech explained. “We support the financing of our country, and so we are not a burden on the taxpayer. Actually, in 2023, the film industry was one-sixth of the economic growth in Malta.” Grech pays tribute to the Maltese government, who has backed his vision. “I wouldn’t have done it without the support of government. I lobbied the government to increase rebate, the government did. And when we created this festival, I had the support of government.” 

Location, Location, :ocation
Since Grech took over, Malta has welcomed such huge Hollywood productions as “Jurassic World: Dominion” and “Jurassic World: Rebirth”, and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” and “Gladiator II,” which returned Scott to the same locations where he shot 2000’s “Gladiator.” More recently, Jason Statham has shot the forthcoming features “Mutiny” and “Viva La Madness” on the island and is currently in Malta for his third project in swift succession, filming the meta-comedy “Jason Statham Stole My Bike.” “We are having repetition of business,” said Grech, who has been smart in cultivating relations with directors and A-listers. 

Last year, as the MFF celebrated a hundred years of filmmaking in Malta, the Golden Bee Awards honored “Gladiator” star Russell Crowe with the Icon award. The actor spoke warmly of his experiences in Malta, and it’s not hard to imagine him returning one day for another shoot. “He’s an ambassador of Malta. He’s a great ambassador and we want to work on more projects with Russell Crowe… We want to keep on strengthening our relationship with him, and with all others who want to keep on putting Malta on the map.” 

Quite how Hollywood views the MFF remains to be seen. Just as the 2025 festival unfolded, the Netflix production “Enola Holmes 3,” a Maltese-set story starring Millie Bobby Brown, was shooting there. Given “Enola Holmes 3” bowed on Netflix on 1 July, just three days after the festival closed, it was a surprise it did not play at the MFF. “They’re very specific on dates, and we were not able to shift the dates, and they were not able to shift the dates,” offered Grech, who is all too aware of the difficulties of luring major studio and streaming premieres to Malta.

While the festival has some innovations, like the Mare Nostrum strand which highlights features and documentaries that explore sustainability and the environment, the curated line-up is chiefly playing films that have already premiered elsewhere. “We are still an infant as a project and we will not compete with other festivals,” said Grech. “We created something of our own, something global that everyone can share and be part of. We are not here to compete with other festivals, but we are here to consolidate our position, Malta’s position, on the global map.”

Where it scores is its film-friendly setting. Alongside this year’s film screenings, panels, and masterclasses (including with director Renny Harlin and actress Famke Janssen), the MFF offered tours around Malta Film Studios and the island itself, allowing directors, producers, location managers and others to scout potential projects and realise what Malta has to offer. “We are giving tours, specific tours, on land and sea, to see the art and the possibilities of Malta,” said Grech. 

Among this year’s guests, British filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff – who participated in the panel “The Character Is Plot,” alongside “John Wick” creator Derek Kolstad – was using his time in Malta to location scout for his forthcoming eight-part political thriller “The Order,” an adaptation of Maltese author Peter Portelli’s novel. All set in the months leading up to the famed Great Siege of Malta in 1565, the series is being produced by Helen Flint, who has already brought the 2026 TV series “Pompei: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston” to Malta. 

Grech also hopes that Mel Gibson, who visited Malta a couple of years back, realises his long-gestating historical epic, another Great Siege-set story. “It will be huge!” he promised of a project that has morphed from feature film to limited TV series over the years. And, understandably, he’s desperate to see more Maltese stories brought to screen, including World War II-set tales. “Malta, being a British colony, was the most bombed country globally during the Second World War,” Grech stated. “We never surrendered. It’s a huge story, too.”

The day before we met, Grech also announced a EUR €2 million (USD $2.28) fund to train and up-skill crew members, thereby putting further financing into training local crew. “I have more ideas,” he added. “Change is a process, not an ending. And we will take even bolder measures to ensure that we are consolidating and making sure that this model of creating a world class film industry is well created and well sustained.”

How does Grech see the MFF evolving? Will it always be a glitzy showcase for what Malta has to offer? Or can it become a major date in the already overcrowded festival calendar? “We want to grow further. We want to be among other festivals, globally. We want to have a legacy, not just for us, but for the next generations,” he explained. Grech’s desire to use the MFF as a flagship for all that Malta has to offer only looks like it’s going to get more fervent. “It’s never enough!” he said. “‘Enough’ is not in our dictionary.”

Part of his master plan comes with overseeing a purpose-built super-soundstage at Malta Film Studios, designed to provide film productions with both land and sea environments. “It’s going to be a first, globally,” Grech proclaimed. With the permits in place and government approvals granted, it’s another step forward in the evolution of Malta as a major destination for movie productions. “This is about building, creating a sustainable world-class film industry,” he added. “We have the vision, we have the drive, we have the commitment, and we’re going to make it happen.”

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The news that Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic “The Odyssey” would not hold “word of mouth” screenings for influencers was further fuel for the fire of a discussion that has raged in recent years. Is this marketing tactic – where commonly these more favourable, less critical reactions from influencers break on social media before the formal review embargo lifts – actually increasing awareness of these films, or is it devaluing the work of critics, whose more considered takes only get airtime after the breathless first wave of reactions.

The first reactions to “The Odyssey” flooded online after the global premiere took place in London on Monday, July 6. While there were some influencers and content creators in the mix – those who’d been invited to the premiere and/or seen advance screenings ahead of junket interviews – there were notably more mainstream critics and writers sharing first-look reactions, including Variety’s Jazz Tangcay, who called the film “a triumphant, spectacular epic” and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (“a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion”). When the film hits cinemas next week, the discourse around the necessity of influencer screenings will surely continue.

It’s a subject that was a central talking point at the 2026 European Film Market (EFM, 12-18 February), which took place earlier this year. Across various panels, conversations about social media marketing were notably less about “going viral” as a goal in itself, and more about whether online attention can be translated into something the industry can bank on, such as ticket sales, streaming subscriptions and durable audience habits. Across panels that ranged from TikTok’s #FilmTok showcase to a broader marketing strategy session on attention scarcity, one tension kept resurfacing: platforms can generate extraordinary cultural heat, but the path from community to cash remains uneven, difficult to measure and – too often – oversold.

That split was clearest on 13 February, when the EFM hosted “From Community to Box Office: How Fandom on TikTok Drives Impact,” an afternoon event framed around the platform’s growing role in shaping film discovery and consumption. TikTok’s Stephen Naughton positioned the platform as an entertainment destination rather than a traditional social network — “You don’t check TikTok; you watch TikTok,” he said — arguing that this mindset matters because users arrive primed to be entertained, not merely updated. He added that the company’s research suggests three-quarters of TikTok’s audience come to the app specifically to find new entertainment, and described the platform as a “24-7 virtual stage” where studios, creators and fans can meet on equal footing.

Naughton’s pitch leaned heavily on the idea that fandom on TikTok is participatory by nature: users do not just watch trailers but remix, analyse and reframe content, helping titles travel across borders in ways that can’t be replicated through classic top-down advertising. He sought to reinforce that narrative with headline figures: in 2025, an average of 6.5 million posts per day related to film and TV appeared on the platform; and, crucially, TikTok has been working with market-research company Media Control to track correlations between virality and theatrical performance. The topline result, according to Naughton: “15 of the 20 most successful theatrical releases in 2025 across Europe were TikTok viral hits,” defined as titles generating over one million related posts.

From Content to Connection
It was a confident argument — but it also underscored the central problem with social media “impact” claims: correlation and causation are easy to blur, especially when the biggest releases are already structurally advantaged through awareness, spend and broad availability. If a title is already set up to dominate the theatrical conversation, it will almost inevitably dominate the TikTok conversation too. The more interesting question is what happens beneath the top tier: can fandom meaningfully lift mid-budget and independent films into wider visibility, and can that lift be reliably engineered rather than hoped for?

TikTok’s preferred answer is “yes — if you treat creators as partners rather than megaphones.” Naughton argued that creator-led content can achieve up to 91% more engagement than traditional advertising assets, and pointed to the company’s work with Constantin Film, where collaborations across more than 15 releases generated over one billion video views. He also highlighted TikTok Spotlight, an aggregation tool that collects official and user-generated content into a central hub, suggesting that structuring fan activity — rather than merely observing it — can help campaigns sustain momentum.

Still, even within TikTok’s own framing, the emphasis was less on replacing conventional marketing than on rethinking what marketing is: less campaign-as-broadcast, more campaign-as-community management. Search behavior became part of that story. Naughton noted that one in five users searches for content within 30 seconds of opening the app, with film-related queries growing by more than 100% year-over-year — an indicator, he suggested, that audiences increasingly treat TikTok as a discovery engine for both theatrical and streaming titles, with real implications for how release campaigns are timed and structured.

Community Spirit
The panel discussion that followed broadened the conversation beyond theatricals into streamer-first dynamics, using Prime Video’s “Maxton Hall” as a case study of a #BookTok phenomenon turned screen hit. Moderated by journalist and presenter Aylin Kazi, the panel brought together Prime Video EU Head of Social Jacky Meire, TikTok creator Melo Nsuka and actress Runa Greiner. If Naughton’s presentation was an attempt to “prove” impact with numbers, the discussion that followed focused on what impact looks like in practice: community engagement as an “extra layer” of storytelling, where fans dissect scenes, debate character arcs and generate an ongoing sense of participation.

The subtext here matters for anyone marketing both theatrical and streaming titles: viewing is no longer a closed experience. Audiences often move straight from watching to TikTok, effectively recreating a shared, communal space around content — sometimes approximating the social energy of theatrical attendance, but with platform-native behaviors, such as commenting, streaming and (doom)scrolling. The talk also returned repeatedly to the idea of creators as trust brokers: recommendations from familiar voices often carry more weight than classic advertising, while behind-the-scenes access and transparency are presented as essential tools for maintaining momentum.

Yet the Maxton Hall example also highlighted a structural asymmetry: streamer launches are already “built” for rapid online conversation, with audiences able to watch immediately once curiosity is triggered. Theatrical releases, by contrast, require friction-heavy conversion: checking listings, choosing a showtime, travelling, paying. Social media can generate intent; cinemas still require action.

That friction came roaring back into focus on 19 February, at another EFM panel titled “Marketing That Works: Turning Change Into a New Advantage,” which approached the same broad subject from a more skeptical, conversion-first angle. Moderated by AC Coppens, the session featured Marina Kosten, USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future; Adriana Trautman, marketing strategist with experience at Paramount and Prime Video; and Oliver Fegan, co-founder and CEO of usheru, a marketing technology company supporting distributors across 30 countries. Where the TikTok session argued that fandom can drive measurable impact, this panel repeatedly asked: measurable how, and at what rate?

Under the Influence
Kosten framed the current environment as a brutal attention economy — “Content is everywhere, and attention is increasingly a zero-sum game,” she said — arguing that marketers often have mere seconds to communicate not just what a film is, but where and when to see it. “If people remember the where and the when, they are much more likely to convert,” she added, stressing that basic clarity is frequently overlooked even as campaigns chase novelty.

Trautman offered a blunt corrective to influencer-era wishful thinking: “Just because you cast an influencer, it does not mean their audience will convert,” she said — and rightly so. In other words, social reach is not the same as audience action — especially when the “influencer” relationship to the title is thin, transactional or obviously paid. In a market that sometimes treats social as a magic shortcut, her point landed as a necessary deflation.

Fegan then provided the kind of statistic that complicates almost any platform-led narrative of conversion: TikTok-driven traffic, he said, converted at just 0.1% when moving from platform to ticket purchase. That figure doesn’t mean TikTok is “ineffective” — it may still be powerful at awareness, discovery and cultural signaling — but it does force a tougher reading of what social media is doing at each stage of the funnel. If the jump from scroll to sale is that small, then campaigns live or die on what happens next: retargeting, repetition, and a cross-platform system that keeps nudging the interested-but-not-yet-committed audience until the friction is overcome.

In that sense, the most actionable ideas in the “Marketing That Works” session were not about chasing virality, but about engineering follow-through. Fegan stressed retargeting as essential — those who show interest but don’t purchase must be approached multiple times, often via automated but personalized messaging. The panel also turned to first-party data, arguing that direct relationships with audiences — through tools like usheru, cinema websites, email lists and smaller communities (including Discord) — are increasingly valuable in a landscape where platform metrics can be opaque and platform algorithms can shift overnight.

The panel’s European-vs-US contrast also sharpened the conversation. In the US, mass marketing remains dominant, supported by budgets that are simply out of reach for most European distributors. Fegan noted, “In Europe, distributors might spend EUR €3,000 (USD $3,425 to market a film in France,” and argued that such constraints force European campaigns to be smarter: niche targeting, community-building and direct audience relationships rather than scale-led saturation.

There was also a recurring emphasis on habit-building. Trautman and Kosten both argued that younger audiences will still go to cinemas, but often for events that feel communal — fandom experiences that resemble concerts or social gatherings. Trautman put it plainly: “They aren’t going for cinema itself; they’re going for connection with peers and shared fandoms.” In that framing, the real competition is not other films but other forms of connection — and the strategic goal becomes making theatrical attendance feel like participation rather than consumption.

Under the Influence
So what were the key takeaways from EFM 2026 overall, on social media marketing for films? Conversations and analysis were more measured than the usual hype cycles, but some contradictions persist.

On one side, TikTok’s case is persuasive in cultural terms: it is undeniably a major arena where audiences discover, discuss and reshape film and TV narratives, and where communities can form quickly around titles, talent and moments. Naughton’s insistence that fandom is “participatory, personal and perpetual” captures something real about contemporary audience behavior, especially when conversation can outlive opening weekend.

This is a point that was emphasised by more recent FilmTok research, released in April 2026. It bears noting that the research was conducted by TikTok and Cinema United, with support from Comscore. The findings proudly claim that TikTok conversation can lead to box office staying power, beyond the opening weekend buzz. Looking at four varied (albeit high-profile) examples — “The Housemaid”, “Sinners”, “Wicked: For Good”, and “Zootopia 2” — the report studies the correlation between increased TikTok activity tied a title, and strong box office holds. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, and buzzy box office hits could be seen to be driving the conversation on social media, rather than interpreting the relationship to be working in the opposite direction, but there were also positive findings relating to increases in #FilmTok and #MovieTok posts (up 55% year on year), and TikTok surveys indicating that 47% of users polled said they’d discovered new films via the platform, and 36% said they’d purchased a ticket as a result. Is short-form social media video the new watercooler?

“This report reinforces what we know to be true: that moviegoing is a cultural experience that resonates deeply with audiences,” said Michael O’Leary, President and CEO of Cinema United. “The data shows that when films connect with communities on TikTok, people come to theatres. That is good for our members, good for Main Streets around the world, and good for the movie industry.” It’s also worth noting that — even if it can’t be said for certain that TikTok is driving users to theaters — TikTok data could be another valuable tool for exhibitors making programming decisions, by indicating which film are still dominating cultural conversations.

On the other side, the more sobering data points from the “Marketing That Works” panel underline that conversion remains the industry’s weak link — and that social media is not a substitute for fundamentals. Availability, clear messaging (“where and when”), repeat exposure, and infrastructure for retargeting and direct audience contact still do much of the heavy lifting.

That’s why some of the most interesting EFM conversations were the ones that implicitly challenged the idea of social media as a silo. Even panels not explicitly “about” social platforms — such as Europa Distribution’s session on co-operation across the film value chain — kept circling back to a marketing reality: audience work cannot be detached from production, sales, exhibition and long-term release planning. The strongest campaigns increasingly start early, build shared objectives across partners and keep communication tight — because, as Spanish distributor Eduardo Escudero put it, “In our market, we only get one shot.” In a world of compressed windows and overstretched attention, that single shot at getting audiences in seats early on in the theatrical run has to be aligned across every link in the chain.

The biggest question, then, is not whether fandom can move audiences — clearly, sometimes it can — but whether the industry is building repeatable systems around that ability. The “Minecraft initiative” type of thinking — meeting audiences inside the spaces where they already play, create and socialise — can sound visionary, and it may well work for certain IP-driven titles and youth-skewing brands. But EFM’s more grounded voices would likely insist on two tests before celebrating any such initiative: show the conversion path, and show the cost per conversion compared to alternatives. Without that, innovation risks becoming experimentation.

Finally, there is the issue of credibility. Social marketing thrives on authenticity; film marketing often defaults to polish. The gap between those two aesthetics is where a lot of campaigns fail. The EFM panels repeatedly hinted at the same underlying principle: the most effective social strategies treat audiences as collaborators rather than targets — and treat creators not as add-ons, but as culturally fluent partners who can translate a film into platform-native language. A film like “The Odyssey,” with the built in appeal of Christopher Nolan – a rare crossover filmmaker as beloved by critics and cinephiles as mainstream audiences – might be big enough to be able to skip influencer screenings. But like many Nolan success stories, it could yet prove to be an exception rather than a rule.

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That was the central argument emerging from the Cannes Docs panel “Micro Cinemas and Macro Impact: Independent Exhibition as a Social and Communal Practice,” held on 16 May at The Viewpoint, Lérins, and curated by DAE – Documentary Association of Europe. Moderated by Jeremy Chua, producer at Potocol and executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival, the session brought together Ruun Nuur, documentary programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival and co-founder of No Evil Eye Cinema; Kira Simon-Kennedy, film producer and volunteer member of Paris’ La Clef collective; and Can Sungu, artistic director of Berlin’s SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA.

Chua opened the discussion by asking how such spaces address audiences underserved by conventional distribution, in a context where the Marché du Film itself embodies a traditional structure of buying and selling films.

For Simon-Kennedy, the answer lies in programming films that audiences are unlikely to encounter elsewhere. Speaking from the perspective of La Clef, a collective-run Paris cinema, she said the group’s work was driven by frustration with what is typically shown. “One of the guiding editorial lines, if there is one in a giant collective, is movies that aren’t shown elsewhere,” she explained. The aim was not to repeat “the same dead white guys,” but to look around the world for films that open up other histories and political memories.

Simon-Kennedy linked this directly to France’s colonial legacy and to gaps in cultural education. She cited the importance of showing films connected to independence movements, noting that works such as “The Battle of Algiers” had long histories of censorship or limited visibility in France. In that sense, programming becomes a way of “rectifying what’s not taught,” and of pushing back against what she called a “failed canon.”

Sungu argued that independent exhibition spaces can also offer distributors and producers a more meaningful route to audiences than some conventional festival strategies. While acknowledging the continued importance of premieres, he said that a small festival screening in a city may not always reach the communities a film is actually speaking to. By contrast, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA can sometimes screen a film three or four times, bringing it into contact with communities that are ready to engage with it.

“We are putting a lot of effort into finding the right communities, to bring the right film with the communities that they are really interested in,” he said. For Sungu, the value lies not only in attendance figures, but in the “discourse space” that opens around a screening, where audiences talk, argue, reflect and even dislike a film together. “I think this belongs to the cinema and this happens also in this physical space of cinema,” he added.

Nuur described how No Evil Eye Cinema’s own model emerged almost accidentally. When the collective first toured its programme “Sequence 01: Diasporic Reckoning”, it brought a new film and filmmaker to each town. “What we didn’t know at the time is we were creating a distribution model for this programme of short films that we would take all over the place,” she recalled.

Because No Evil Eye Cinema did not initially have access to sales agents or distributors, it used the networks it did have. Nuur, whose background is in film criticism, said the organisation made a point of inviting critics, editors, writers and festival programmers to screenings so that emerging filmmakers could receive coverage and visibility. The programme mixed first-time filmmakers with more established names, and this created a responsibility to support all of them beyond the single screening event.

Futureproofing Engagement
Looking ahead, Nuur said the collective is interested in working with a streaming platform that could host grouped programmes and pay filmmakers, expanding access beyond physical venues. She also described plans for masterclasses involving contemporary film workers, from cinematographers and directors to archivists and preservationists, as a way to connect audiences more deeply with artistic practice.

Sungu also pointed to SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s “Cinema of Harmony” project, launched in 2022, which brings together alternative cinema practices around the world, with a focus on the Global South while also involving European partners. The initiative shares films between micro cinemas, supports subtitling and allows works to circulate across different cities and linguistic contexts. He suggested that these models may eventually create new synergies with distributors.

The conversation became more urgent when an audience member raised the lack of cinemas in low-income neighbourhoods and communities of colour, particularly in New York. Simon-Kennedy responded by connecting cultural access to wider systems of inequality. “There’s an enormous lack of access,” she underscored. “There’s an overconcentration of resources, but not just cultural – like medical, educational – in the wealthiest, whitest neighbourhoods because of racism and segregation.”

Nuur made a similar comparison, saying the lack of cinemas in Black, brown and low-income neighbourhoods resembled the existence of food deserts. “Film, art, cultural centres are a source of nourishment in a way like food is,” she said. He pointed to grassroots initiatives such as Alfreda Cinema in New York and Cinespeak in Philadelphia as examples of organisations bringing films directly to communities rather than expecting audiences to travel to institutional spaces.

For Sungu, the key was trust. He expressed scepticism about top-down outreach policies aimed at BIPOC communities, arguing that meaningful audience-building can only work through organic relationships. “I don’t believe in these kind of outreach policies that some institutions are doing,” he said. “This can only function if the organic relation is basically functioning.”

The speakers also discussed practical tools: La Clef’s printed flyers distributed in local markets, No Evil Eye Cinema’s press outreach and partnerships with institutions connected to filmmakers, and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s use of Q&As, conversations and even WhatsApp groups where communities organise outside mainstream social media platforms.

Across the session, micro cinemas emerged not as marginal alternatives, but as living infrastructures: spaces where distribution, access, criticism, community and care can be rebuilt from the ground up.

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The annual report, labeled by Marché du Film executive director Guillaume Esmiol as “the bible of the Marché du Film,” was introduced in a session that featured Martin Kanzler, deputy head of department for market information at the Observatory; Nicolas Edmery and Elisa Joliveau-Breney, film analysts at the Observatory;  and Naohiro Kaji, director of the Culture and Creative Industries Division at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The panel discussion combined global market data, a closer look at Europe, and a special focus on Japan, this year’s country of honor.

A Global Stage
Kanzler said the 2026 edition marked a change in scope. Rather than concentrating mainly on Europe and the country of honor, the Observatory had for the first time added up its country-by-country data to provide broader global estimates by region. Film analyst Edmery clarified that “world” in this context refers to 82 markets, covering about six billion inhabitants and accounting for almost the entire global box office. The Observatory’s figures therefore remain provisional and based on differing national methodologies, but they offer one of the clearest snapshots of the theatrical sector’s direction of travel.

According to the study, 4.98 billion cinema tickets were sold worldwide in 2025, up 3% on 2024 but still roughly 28% below the 2017-2019 pre-pandemic average. Global gross box office rose by 5% to EUR 29.56 billion, remaining around 20% below pre-pandemic levels. The recovery was concentrated in a handful of large markets: the 10 biggest territories accounted for 77% of worldwide admissions and 76% of global box office.

Asia accounted for 54% of global admissions in 2025 and 38% of global box office, making it the largest region by attendance and revenue. The region’s growth was driven primarily by China and Japan, while Europe and Latin America recorded declines. China sold 1.238 billion tickets, up 23% year on year, while Japan reached 188.8 million admissions, a 31% rise on 2024 and its highest level since 2019.

By contrast, Europe fell by 5.4%, from 841 million admissions in 2024 to 795 million in 2025, while gross box office declined by 3% to EUR 6.51 billion (USD $7.59bn). North America was broadly stable in attendance terms, with the US and Canada reaching 780 million admissions, up 2%, though box office dipped slightly to EUR €7.85 billion (USD $9.15bn).

Hollywood’s Waning Influence
Edmery noted that the weakness of US films in Europe was one of the key factors behind the continent’s decline. US titles sold an estimated 48 million fewer tickets in Europe than in 2024, while European films also lost ground because of the absence of major French local hits. Admissions for national films in France dropped by 30 million, even as national films in other European markets collectively grew by around four million admissions.

Despite this, US films remained dominant in most markets. Globally, North American films accounted for an estimated 52% of admissions in 2025, down from 63% in 2019. Asian films, meanwhile, increased their share from 27% in 2019 to 36% in 2025, underlining a clear shift in the composition of global demand.

The symbolic case was China’s “Ne Zha 2”, which became the first non-US studio film to top the global chart, generating an estimated EUR €1.77 billion (USD $2.06bn) worldwide. Four Asian films ranked among the global top 20, including Japan’s “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle – Part 1”, which grossed EUR €690 million (USD $804.25m) globally.

Japan was presented as a particularly striking case. Unlike Europe, where US films still represented around 62% of admissions, Japan’s market was overwhelmingly driven by domestic titles. Japanese films captured a 76% market share, while US films accounted for just 20%, well below their pre-pandemic average of 39%.

Asked why Japan had managed to exceed its pre-pandemic audience level, Kaji, representing Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, pointed first to the competitiveness of local films. “The answer is simply attractive films,” he said, citing “Demon Slayer” and “Kokuho” as examples. He stressed that Japan had achieved this without quotas or major regulatory intervention. “It is a free market,” he said. “People can select over-the-top, Netflix or something like that, but they can also select the movie.”

The three biggest films in Japan in 2025 were all local: “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle”with 27 million admissions, “Kokuho”with 13 million, and “Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback” with 10 million. While animation remained the most powerful driver of admissions, Edmery emphasized that live-action Japanese films also performed strongly, with titles such as the aforementioned“Kokuho”plus “Exit 8” showing the breadth of the local market.

Japanese Film Goes Global
The international growth of Japanese titles was another major theme. Kaji argued that around 2020 marked a turning point for the Japanese content industry, as overseas revenues began to outweigh domestic ones in certain segments. “Beforehand, overseas sales were some kind of pocket money, a bonus,” he said. “After 2020, the Japanese film industry started to think this is usual business.”

That change, he suggested, altered investment behavior. If international revenue is no longer seen as a bonus but as a normal part of the business model, larger production budgets become easier to justify. “That is why the quality is rising, and global people find Japanese film,” he said.

The production data also underlined Japan’s scale. The country produced 694 national feature films in 2025, the highest number on record and the second-largest production volume worldwide after India, which released 768 films. By comparison, Europe produced an estimated 2,522 films across all markets, while global theatrical feature production stood at approximately 7,707 films.

Elisa Joliveau-Breney, film analyst at the Observatory, contrasted Japan’s production ecosystem with Europe’s. Europe accounted for 35% of global production volume but only around 10% of global admissions. Asia accounted for 40% of global production and 36% of admissions.

The structural differences are significant. Animation represented only 3% of European production on average, compared with 13% in Japan. Co-productions accounted for 23% of European films, but only around 3% of Japanese releases. Adaptation also plays a much larger role in Japan: according to Joliveau-Breney, nearly all of the Japanese films in the country’s 2025 top 20 were adapted from existing intellectual property, with “First Kiss” being the only exception.

Kaji said adaptation sits at the center of Japan’s content strategy, which is increasingly organized around what the government calls “IP360.” The idea is to develop intellectual property across film, manga, anime, games and music rather than treating cinema as an isolated sector. “Japanese manga, anime and games are very, very charming,” he said. “The film industry can also use these advantages.”

How Financing Options Vary By Country
Financing models offered perhaps the sharpest contrast between Europe and Japan. Joliveau-Breney noted that European films remain highly dependent on public support. Most European films have budgets below EUR €10 million (USD $11.66m), with the average budget standing at about EUR €2.2 million (USD $2.56m). The main financing sources are direct public funding, production incentives, broadcaster investment, producer investment and pre-sales. When direct public backing and incentives are combined, public support covers almost half of the average European film budget; when public broadcasters are included, the public share rises further.

Kaji said this was “very surprising” from a Japanese perspective. “The norm in Japan is private investment,” he said. The Japanese production committee system, he explained, is a private risk-sharing structure in which multiple operating companies invest and take on specific roles. “The production committee is a risk-sharing system,” he said, adding that it works well for medium-sized investment but becomes more complex for large-scale films and international operations.

That system, however, is also evolving. Kaji said blockbuster projects increasingly involve fewer committee members, allowing a smaller number of companies to take larger risks. Whereas committees might once have involved ten or more companies, some now involve only three, while the anime studio MAPPA took on “Chainsaw Man” with a much more concentrated investment structure.

Government policy is also changing. Japan has traditionally favored low levels of regulation and limited direct intervention, in contrast with Europe’s dense system of funds, incentives, quotas, investment obligations and public broadcasters. Kaji said this reflects a long-standing belief that cultural diversity in Japan can be achieved through private-sector activity rather than state intervention.

But export is now giving the government a clearer rationale for action. “For the goal abroad, because of maybe the island country and the barrier of the language, it is difficult for Japanese people to go overseas and reach the global market,” Kaji said. He added that there is growing public and political support for helping Japanese manga, anime, film and games reach international audiences.

Japan’s content-industry support has therefore expanded. Kaji said government support for the content sector had doubled compared with the previous year, while the budget within his ministry had tripled. He linked this to the policy direction of Prime Minister Takaichi’s cabinet, which has identified the content industry as one of Japan’s growth sectors and a means of earning foreign currency.

Cultural Objectives, Global Ambitions
Next, Kanzler placed Japan’s approach in a broader policy context, first outlining the traditional logic behind European film policy. “Most European film policies are traditionally primarily driven by cultural objectives,” he said. “So producing films in national languages, telling local stories, connecting with local audiences. And at the same time, and of course this is closely linked, safeguarding the national film industries, which often are very small national markets.”

He then described three broad European models. “One type puts the producer and the industry at the center, and pursues both, on the one hand, cultural diversity goals and, on the other hand, an emphasis on the strength and the competitiveness of the local production industry,” he said. “That model, in different variations, is the most prominent one across continental Europe.” By contrast, “the UK pursues a very different approach,” with “a clear economic focus” on “GDP growth, job employment and industrial competitiveness as a whole.” At the other end of the spectrum, he added, the Nordic countries often follow what they call a “citizen focus,” where funding cares about “cultural identity and the role of film” and also contributes to “social inclusion and social cohesion.”

These rationales are matched by three main tools: investment obligations requiring broadcasters and streamers to invest in local audiovisual production; production incentives such as cash rebates and tax shelters; and direct public funding, both selective and automatic. “Direct public funding generally is seen as the tool of choice to support cultural diversity and artistic quality,” Kanzler said.

Yet European policy is also moving. Kanzler pointed to the growth of automatic funding and production incentives, suggesting a gradual shift from purely cultural rationales toward more economic goals. Investment obligations are also starting to have measurable effects. French CNC data, he noted, show streamer investment in French film production rising from virtually nothing before the pandemic to a meaningful share of financing in recent years.

What This Means For Exhibitors
For exhibitors, the implications of the FOCUS data are clear but not simple. The global screen base remains resilient, with more than 220,000 theatrical screens operating worldwide in 2025, compared with around 200,000 before the pandemic. The number of screens grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, remained stable in Europe and Latin America, and declined by 14% in North America.

But admissions have not recovered at the same pace. The market is more concentrated, more dependent on local breakouts in several key territories, and less automatically driven by US studio product than before the pandemic. Asia’s growth, Japan’s domestic strength and the rise of IP-led export strategies all point to a theatrical market whose center of gravity is becoming more plural.

As Kaji put it, Japan’s policy shift is no longer about supporting culture alone, but about treating content as “an industry of future national growth”. For the global cinema business, that may be the larger lesson of the latest FOCUS research: recovery is happening, but it is being led by markets and models that do not necessarily look like the old Hollywood-centered order.

The post Global Cinema Attendance Inches Up, But the Recovery Belongs to Asia, Says the Latest FOCUS Report appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Titled “Retention, Reach, Revenue: Growing Cinema Audiences,” the conference’s primary focus was on how to further strengthen the post-COVID recovery of the UK theatrical sector, and while neither the speakers nor the attendees were naive to the ongoing challenges, there was pragmatic optimism in a look ahead that embraced new technology while also going back to basics on the value – in every sense of the word – of the cinematic experience.

The Numbers Game
The conference began with some reasons to be cheerful, with an opening panel from Lucy Jones of Rentrak (formerly Comscore Movies). Statistically speaking, 2025 recorded a 1% increase in annual box office revenue after a plateau the previous two years. This was helped by an increase in saturation releases, which rose to a record 224 last year. That volume presents its own challenges, particularly for exhibitors and programmers, but as Jones put it, “It’s a nice challenge to have, but if you are running a cinema, particularly with fewer screens, it is a real challenge to keep those films on screen to really fulfil their potential.”

Even though numbers haven’t returned to 2019 levels, three consecutive years with UK box office takings in excess of GBP £1 billion (USD $1.34 billion) is extremely reassuring. “We’re back in the billion club that we used to see before the pandemic,” said Jones. 

More reassuring still, takings for 2026 are following a similar pattern to 2025 when tracked weekly, albeit with a slight increase in almost all weeks. But the headline news was that this year is on course to deliver GBP £1.19 billion (USD $1.6 billion) at the UK box office, which would be a leap of 10% year on year, and only 14% shy of the 2019 yardstick.

Another takeaway was the correlation charted between a film’s gross and audiences’ ‘excellent’ approval rating according to Postrak data. There’s a general trend that the films that are most highly rated go on to have the biggest takings, and in 2025 those titles included “A Minecraft Movie,” “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” There were outliers that potentially left money on the table (including “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another”), and the chart showing children’s approval ratings versus box office gave the dispiriting indication that there’s no correlation between a film’s quality and its performance (which may feel all too familiar for parents of young children).

In Jones’ closing remarks she suggested wringing every last drop from those crowdpleasing quality releases, and also finding ways to innovate with more tailored, targeted marketing to “connect the right film with the right person at the right time.” If this panel started the conference on an optimistic note, it also signalled some back to basics truths about cinemagoing that bear repeating. Of course, the films need to be good, but it goes beyond that.

Community Centered
Even good movies will only carry a cinema so far, according to multiple panels at the conference that stressed cinema’s value as community hub. This was a key theme in the “Audience Development – Lessons from the Coalface” panel, which was moderated by Clapp and featured UK operators working outside the multiplex model.

Sarah Hulls from the Magic Lantern Cinema in Tywyn, Wales – a one-screen venue that recently celebrated its 125th year of showing films – spoke about the need to adapt their offering, not least because the town has a small and predominantly elderly population. “We’ve become a cultural hub rather than just a cinema,” Hulls said of the expanded offering. Among the community work Hulls described were dementia-friendly screenings and a Welsh-language season, as well as hosting the Spotlight Awards for local businesses and a high-school prom. They even open on Christmas Day to provide food and company for those who are seeking it.

Ben Hammond, of the Ashford Cinema in Kent, described a similar set-up. “That’s the kind of ethos we’re trying to build… We want to be a community and a place where the community can come and relax and hang out, regardless of what they’re here to do. They can talk, they can socialize, they can interact,” he explained. “We’ve got lots of access groups that come and just play board games because we’ve got the space to do it.” While some of the “eventizing” that Hammond spoke of was cinema-themed – including retro screenings featuring live talent Q&As – others were unrelated, such as an international magic convention. “The cinema still ran five screens from morning to night [alongside the convention],” said Hammond. “The cinema operations didn’t change, but we ran a day and a half’s worth of international magic with magicians coming from all over the world. It was completely sold out and a real premium event.”

Even more remote is Mareel, a venue on the Scottish archipelago Shetland, which is 110 miles from mainland Scotland. “Mareel itself is built as an arts center,” said Graeme Howell. “So we’ve got a 340 capacity performance space, education facilities, recording studios, cafes, retail space, cinema screens, and we tick away trying to deliver as much as we can for everyone in Shetland.” Mareel also serves a civic role, acting as a banking hub and a place where residents can top up their electricity meters. “It’s a really diverse mix of the community that makes use of the facilities.”

A separate panel highlighting one cinema in particular – The Station Cinema in Richmond, North Yorkshire – offered a case study in growing audiences by engaging communities not as an afterthought, but as a core strategy. The Station Cinema’s General Manager, Dan Westgarth explained that previous attempts to offer neurodiverse screenings in a quiet schedule gap fell flat. But after speaking to advocacy groups directly, they were able to discover what an appropriate screening actually looks like for their neurodiverse patrons. A similar approach was taken with school groups, the local Ukrainian population, and other underserved groups. Though Westgarth is keen to stress that such a community building is a “long-term relationship, not a one-off transaction,” plugging away with consistency has its rewards. Over the long term, it has built an engaged customer base that now expects and anticipates eventized screenings. And in the shorter term, that commitment to customers can go viral, as The Station Cinema experienced with their dog-friendly screenings, which gained a huge amount of attention on social media and made the national news. Taking an audience first approach and harnessing the power of social media were themes that were reiterated across the conference.

Accessibility All Areas
One of the most illuminating talks of the UKCA 2026 line-up was the panel discussion “Welcoming Deaf Audiences,” led by Paramount Pictures Paul Lofting. Taking part were deaf advocate Tianah Hodding and representatives from Vue, Odeon and Movie House Cinemas. Lofting highlighted the work Paramount has done over the past few years, since they “started to have a look at whether we could knock down some of those barriers and see what we could move or change. And we focused on three areas. They were training, the quality of captioning, and actual programming of captioned shows.” Lofting said that since October 2024, “most Paramount movies have previews one or two days ahead of their Friday opening exclusively in caption format, so we could give deaf cinema-goers the opportunity to be among the first people to experience new releases.”

Lofting presented a pre-emptive riposte to the claim that too many captioned screenings would be off-putting to those patrons who don’t have accessibility needs. For the release of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” in May 2025, Paramount worked with Cineworld, Vue and Showcase in the UK on a rollout that gave particular attention to captioned screenings. “We agreed with them to play a minimum daily captioned show of the movie over the first nine days of the film’s release in every single cinema that they operate – whether that was twenty screens, ten screens, four screens.” The approach also included ensuring that there were captioned shows during evenings and weekends, which led to “just under 2,000” captioned screenings of that film in its first nine days of release, Lofting said. From all of those screenings, the chains received zero complaints. “We’ve proven it, so now let’s move on,” said Lofting.

Communications consultant and actor Hodding, who is deaf, brought her own first-hand experience to the panel. “I’m very obsessed with film and filmmaking, and I go to the cinema whenever I get the chance,” she said. “I’m currently campaigning to get more friendly access for [Deaf audiences], there’s eighteen million Deaf people in the UK, and we’re constantly growing. And there’s a lot of us who need to be able to go to the cinema whenever we want on our terms, not yours. On a Tuesday at 9am doesn’t work for Deaf people who work 9-5. It’s also quite important to normalize access from the get-go.”

Hodding also explained how restricted access to captioned performances also could impact friends, family and particularly children of Deaf people who would be looking to attend the cinema with the hearing impaired family member. “Imagine you’re looking at a schedule or a program and it says, ‘Oh, you can watch a movie at 10am with sound.’ Anyone imagine that? So not only do we lose out, but also our friends and family lose out as well, just to give you a bit of an understanding.”

Also being showcased at the conference were tech solutions for accessibility from Auracast and WatchWord. Auracast is an assistive listening device that can receive real-time hearing assistance via Bluetooth, and WatchWord supplies smart glasses that can display closed captions (provided by the Digital Cinema Package (DCP)) to the wearer. WatchWord comes with a control that can personalise the placement of the text, as well as colour and size making them a flexible solution (audience members requiring captions can attend any screening and access captions from the DCP, rather than having to wait for a dedicated screening).

The overall takeaway from the session was that accessibility should be a forethought rather than an afterthought, and a lack of preparedness can impact more than just those with accessibility needs, as it can ripple out to affect their families and friends, making cinema a less enticing prospect for a much wider group than might initially be counted.

Know Your Enemy
Another theme to emerge time and again at this year’s conference was using digital tools – such as social media and AI – to enhance your reach and increase your potential footfall, rather than just treating it as the enemy, a competitor to the cinema experience.

In the “From Scroll to Screen: Winning the Fight for Attention” panel, David Cameron, the head of marketing for Vue UK and Ireland, discussed what it meant now that Gen Z audiences were typically spending up to five hours per day on social media. “It’s so important we are engaging and connecting with those audiences, and creating great value because they are spending so much time there,” he said of the chain’s social media strategy. But he also spoke of the value of the comments sections of their social media channels for providing genuine customer feedback.

Carla Boyd, director of digital marketing, international at Cineworld, said that the company sees that online space as “almost like our digital foyer… It’s where the decisions get made on: ‘What films do we want to watch? What merch do we want to buy?’” Boyd also spoke about the digital word of mouth that films such as “The Sheep Detectives” and “Project Hail Mary” have benefitted from. 

On the same panel, the British Film Institute’s (BFI) research manager Paul McEvoy highlighted some illuminating findings from the organization’s Audience Screen Engagement Tracker. “We found in the research that these habituated social media users are not abandoning other content,” McEvoy explained, addressing the perception that so-called ‘doomscrollers’ are never putting their phones down. “They’re actually heavier users of other content. Daily users of short-form [online video] are thirty percent more likely to go to the cinema. They’re nearly forty percent more likely to stream.” Perhaps the most surprising statistic to emerge from the BFI’s research is that only 14% of Gen Z participants said they wanted phone use to be allowed in cinemas. “They really see the value in cinema being a digital oasis [free from phones],” he added. “We also saw that the main reason they go to the cinema is as a social outing.”

A panel on AI (“Reaching Cinema Audiences Across AI Search and Discovery Tools”) suggested how businesses could leverage audiences’ increasing reliance on AI in much the same way search engine optimization looks for gains via browser discovery. A case study on The Living Room Cinema in Chipping Norton explained how marketing company Mojo Works researched the ideal customer profile, planned against real world scenarios and queries (such as “family activities in the Cotswolds this weekend”), and getting the cinema’s website more digestible for the AI tools that are going to be ‘reading’ it. 

“How do we make sure that information is machine readable?” asked Oskars Killo, founding partner of Mojo Works. “That’s a very important thing to take away. There will be different structures and tech related items that need to happen for that.” Among the quick wins are “working with the POS provider and the website team to to set up the backend elements like schemas and JSON [JavaScript Object Notation].” Having a detailed, well-structured FAQ section is also seen as a big help.

Claire Beswick, founder and CEO of The Living Room Cinema stressed the importance of the information being aligned with customers’ day-to-day experience of the brand. “You can’t be just spending all of your time putting together information for the machines to read which actually then gives you an answer which is not consistent with your brand,” she said. Ensuring that your business details are consistent across third-party platforms like search engines and maps was also described as crucial. Valentin Degen, CEO and co-founder of International Showtimes, explained the importance of “surfacing more rich data to the AI so that the user can make more informed decisions.”

If there was the whiff of a sales pitch about the presentation, a compelling case was made for businesses to shore up against these upheavals in consumer behaviour, and provided a less doomy narrative than is often spun about how AI will impact the cinema industry.

State of Play
Perhaps the most illuminating and lively discussion of the conference was the annual Executive Roundtable, featuring key voices from distribution and exhibition. Due to the free-flowing nature of the conversation, attendees were requested to report the headlines without specific attribution, but across the board there was plenty to be positive about. With a group assembled from distributors and exhibitors of various sizes, the panel consistently said they were “optimistic” about the current health of the sector.

The mood was buoyed by the current relative overperformance of films that didn’t fall into the conventional blockbuster template. “It’s not being driven by one particular film,” said one studio representative. “I think we’re actually seeing a genuine shift in audience behavior.” There was a caution expressed about a lack of “spikes” with truly overperforming blockbusters of the pre-pandemic likes of Star Wars and Marvel pictures, but the overall consensus was that the industry was in a stronger place for not placing all hopes on a very select group of bankable tentpole releases, and instead having a more varied slate that was attracting more diverse crowds.

Rebuilding cinema as a habitual experience was also a key theme of the discussion. In part that’s down to the aforementioned varied slate, and the increasing emphasis that exhibitors are putting on premium experiences, from screens and projection to seating and beyond. But alongside this, more than one participant made the point of cinemas needing to reclaim the narrative that it is an expensive pastime. “What else can you go and do for a couple of hours that’s gonna cost around GBP £10?” asked one exhibition representative, while another studio exec pointed out that the price of a beer and cinema ticket have never been closer. Although discussion did turn to the fact that cinema is perceived as expensive, even if the evidence suggests that’s not the case relative to other options for a night out. “I think we have to do a little more work on positioning that in the right [way],” said one participant. “And it doesn’t mean about cheapening [ticket prices]. It’s about just creating the perception of value for money and how we do that.”

If there was a point of tension in the discussion, it was around release windows, and whether it was right for streamers like Netflix to put films into cinemas for just two weeks before they were available at home. The case was made that the audience should come first, and if they really want to see a title such as “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man” on the big screen, then cinemas need to meet that need. But there was pushback from participants who felt that a longer window was essential across the board, in order to set audience expectations. But if that was a pinch point, the overall tenor of the conversation was optimistic and upbeat.

In conjunction with some of the remaining panels that played out over the two-day session – including talks from organisations working to engage Gen Z audiences with cinema, suppliers looking at ways to improve and eventize the audience experience from the foyer to the auditorium, and even the social media strategies to build advanced buzz and sustain post-release engagement, the generally positive mood seemed to be about embracing the momentum of a recovering box office through best practices rather than an existential-crisis-induced reinvention. If the 2026 figures hold as expected, maybe the mood will be even more ebullient next year.

The post UKCA 2026 Conference: Box Office Optimism, Engaging Gen Z, and Leveraging the Power of Community appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Regal’s newly renovated Sherman Oaks Galleria theatre served as the setting on June 15 for Deadline x Regal’s “Future of Storytelling for the Big Screen” panel, a wide-ranging conversation that began with box office optimism and quickly moved into the unresolved business questions still shaping theatrical exhibition: supply, windows, consolidation and the premium-format arms race.

The theatre itself was, by any measure, a statement. Sixteen screens, four of them premium-format: two PLF auditoriums, an IMAX and a 4DX. That configuration, which would have been exceptional even a few years ago, felt like the implicit argument running under the entire conversation. A domestic box office at USD $4.1 billion — the best pace since 2019 — and a summer pushing toward USD $1.6 billion provided the tailwind. The panel provided the texture.

Adam Fogelson, chairman of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group; Andrew Cripps, head of theatrical distribution at Disney Studios; Blair Rich, chief marketing and commercial officer at Legendary Entertainment; and filmmaker Michael Tiddes, whose recent “Scary Movie” opened to USD $105.5 million globally for Paramount and Miramax, joined Regal Cinemas CEO Eduardo Acuna for the discussion. The panel was moderated by Anthony D’Alessandro, Editorial Director and Box Office Editor of Deadline.

Three subjects generated the most heat: the looming Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, the persistent confusion around theatrical windows, and a shared conviction that exhibition is undersupplied with premium large-format screens at exactly the moment audiences have decided they want them. But before the panel reached those issues, the executives first tried to explain why the mood in the room had changed so sharply from the industry’s recent doom-and-gloom years.

Younger Audiences Are Back, But Not on Old Terms
Acuna framed the recovery as the result of the industry doing more of what it is supposed to do, and doing it better. “What gives us confidence is that every single person here is doing their job better than they ever have,” he said. For exhibitors, that means cleaner theatres, better service, better presentation and more intentional marketing. For studios, it means films that audiences can recognize as theatrical events, whether they come from familiar IP, original ideas or communities that have not always been well understood by Hollywood.

Rich pointed to the current diversity of releases as one reason the market has regained momentum. After COVID and the strike-related supply disruption, she said, audiences are finally seeing a mix of films that gives them a reason to return. “For the first time in such a long time, truly something for every audience” is in theatres, Rich said, adding that audiences have responded to originality, thoughtful sequels and what she called “IRL connected experiences.”

Fogelson said the more optimistic mood matters because it changes the decisions studios and exhibitors are willing to make. “I’ve been concerned for the last bunch of years that everyone has been making decisions as if it was the apocalypse,” he said. “I think that leads to bad decision making across the board, from studios, from exhibitors, from everybody.”

Much of that optimism is coming from younger moviegoers, including Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences that the industry spent years worrying it had lost. Rich said the campaign for “A Minecraft Movie” showed how much the marketing language has changed. “If you’re not prepared to learn that language and be fluent in that language and meet them where they are,” she said, “it doesn’t connect.”

Fogelson made a similar point about “Michael,” arguing that younger audiences did not need to be convinced that Michael Jackson had cultural currency so much as be given marketing materials they could share on their own terms. “If you over-share everything, if you look like you’re working hard,” he said, “you’re going to get flat out rejected.”

Tiddes said Paramount’s campaign for “Scary Movie” worked because it invited younger audiences into the joke rather than simply selling them a franchise. The film, he said, was positioned around the same irreverent, communal experience that made earlier R-rated comedies theatrical events. “A laugh alone gets a chuckle,” Tiddes said. “But that same laugh in a theatre could get a roar.”

Acuna argued that the return of young audiences also reflects a broader saturation with digital life. Regal, he said, had once tested texting-friendly screenings in response to fears that young audiences would only come back if allowed to use their phones during movies. Those auditoriums, he said, “failed massively.” The lesson was not that theatres needed to become more like phones, but that they needed to offer a real alternative to them. “When I’m here, I want you to take my phone away,” Acuna said, summarizing the audience response. “Just give me that moment with other people.”

The Paramount-WBD Merger Question Nobody Could Fully Answer
The panel’s most direct business discussion came near the end, when D’Alessandro raised the pending Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Acuna opened with the diplomatic but unmistakable caution of someone who has watched consolidation play out in other industries. “Wait and see,” he said.

And then he explained why waiting and seeing worries him. What exhibitors need, above all, is volume. Not only the biggest tentpoles — volume. The more a merged company concentrates development around IP franchises and reduces the number of mid-tier releases, the harder it becomes for Regal and its peers to fill 16 screens across a calendar year.

“Paramount has done terrific work,” Acuna said, citing the executives the studio has brought in and recent franchise activity. “On the other hand, we’re all concerned with consolidation, just in general. In any industry in the world, consolidation usually doesn’t bring the best to the industry.”

Fogelson offered the most analytically useful framing of the group. His argument was essentially a conditional: if the combined entity operates Paramount and Warner Bros. as two genuinely independent labels, maintaining both slates, not much changes for exhibition. If instead the merged company cherry-picks the highest-value IP from each and consolidates around tentpoles, then every successful original Warner Bros. title of the past two years — and Fogelson was specific that studios including Lionsgate had been bidding on those same projects — gets redistributed to the companies still willing to make them.

“I think someone’s going to step in,” Fogelson said. His read was that the ecosystem adapts, particularly now that the box office has demonstrably proven the commercial case for theatrical.

That optimism is grounded but not unconditional. What Fogelson was really arguing is that the current market recovery has created competitive incentives that did not exist two or three years ago. When the box office was struggling, the pressure was to move product to streaming. Now that it is not, the calculus has shifted — and a merged Paramount-WBD that pulls back on theatrical supply creates an opening, not just a void.

Rich, who works with both studios through Legendary’s co-financing structure — the “Dune” franchise with Warner Bros. and “Street Fighter” with Paramount — kept it direct. “The commitment needs to be to make sure that the product level stays high,” she said. Cripps, for his part, landed the close: the panel had started by noting that moviegoing is in a good place. “Hopefully nothing from the merger jeopardizes that.”

Windows: The Debate Has Shifted From Length to Confusion
The panel’s most revealing exchange on theatrical windows was not about whether they should be longer or shorter. It was about the fact that they have not meaningfully changed — and the box office has recovered anyway.

Fogelson flagged the obvious data point, because someone had to: all of the success happening right now is occurring within the existing window framework that studios and exhibitors have spent years arguing over. He was careful not to turn that observation into a fixed Lionsgate position, but he wanted the room to notice that the apocalypse scenario used to justify shrinking windows during the COVID era has not materialized.

“All the success is happening, and the window changes that everyone’s been talking about haven’t been implemented,” Fogelson said. “That does not mean I’m not in favor of them at all. It simply is noteworthy that nothing has yet changed with respect to windows, and people are flocking to movie theatres.”

He did, however, identify a genuine exception at the smaller end of the market. “Obsession,” one of this summer’s indie breakout hits, was raised as an example of the kind of smaller film whose early PVOD timing had been part of the industry conversation. Fogelson’s larger point was that a rigid window may solve one problem while creating another for films that rely on quicker downstream revenue.

“There’s a really good argument for why a 45-day window makes sense,” Fogelson said. “However…for smaller movies, are fewer smaller movies going to have a shot if they don’t work and they have to wait 45 days, because the economics for those movies become more challenging? I don’t know the answer.”

That nuance — that a 45-day window is increasingly treated as the industry norm at the studio level but may remain a financial constraint for smaller distributors — is exactly the kind of tension that tends to get flattened in broad policy debates, and Fogelson was careful not to flatten it.

Acuna came at the problem from a different angle, and for exhibitors, his data point was the more alarming one. A recent NRG study, he said, found that approximately 32% of moviegoers still believe new theatrical releases are available at home for free in under two weeks. That’s not a windows problem so much as an information problem — and a stubborn one. Even if studios and exhibitors agreed tomorrow on the perfect window structure, a third of the audience would still be acting on the wrong assumption.

“The big problem with windows has been just the confusion around what the window is,” Acuna said. “There are customers who still don’t know.”

He also called out a specific practice that muddles the picture further: some studios allow pre-purchases of films on Amazon Prime or iTunes while those films are still in their theatrical window. To a consumer, a pre-purchase availability signal can look a lot like an imminent release date.

“You may think that that movie is going to be available at home in a week,” Acuna said. “Some studios do that, some studios don’t do that.”

It’s an inconsistency no 45-day minimum guarantee can fix on its own — which is why Acuna keeps returning to volume rather than precision as the real fix. The goal, in his framing, isn’t to impose one rigid number across every film. It’s to protect the value of theatrical while ensuring studios still make enough money to keep producing films at all. “The only thing that’s more important than windows is the number of titles we have to show,” he said.

Premium Screens: Undersupplied, and Everyone Knows It
On premium large-format screens, the panel was nearly unanimous: there are not enough of them. The marketplace is currently making that shortage loudly visible.

The case study doing most of the work in this conversation was the year-end collision between “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Two mega-tentpoles, releasing within weeks of each other, neither with an exclusive IMAX run — a fact Cripps confirmed directly, and without apology.

“If we didn’t have confidence that both were going to work, one of us wouldn’t be there,” Cripps said. “It’s probably the best time for moviegoers of the calendar year. There are two and a half to three weeks of holidays, literally around the world. If people want to go see both of these movies, they have plenty of time to do so.”

On the IMAX question specifically, Cripps argued that the format’s absence from “Avengers: Doomsday” is a constraint Disney went in with eyes open, not a fatal liability. He pointed to “Barbie,” “Lilo and Stitch” and the last “Jurassic” film as major successes that did not rely on IMAX to prove their theatrical credentials.

“We love IMAX as a format. More importantly, we love IMAX as a brand,” Cripps said. “But there are plenty of examples of movies that have not had IMAX that have done really, really well.”

Acuna made the operational case from the exhibition side. The renovated Sherman Oaks Galleria now houses four premium-format auditoriums across 16 screens. “When we remodel this one, we put in four, which is not normal,” he said. “Customers are more discerning than ever. Customers want more quality than ever.”

Cripps made the same case from the distribution side, and the two arguments are really one argument seen from opposite ends of the supply chain: exhibitors are building premium capacity because the audience demands it, and studios want that capacity to exist because the marketing payoff of a first weekend seen in the best possible format compounds. “When you open a movie that we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars making, and then marketing, I think you want those first consumers to see it in the best way possible,” he said. “We’ve got to offer consumers something different from that experience they get at home.”

Rich added the access dimension. She described a “Dune: Part Two” superfan near Buffalo who drove toward the Canadian border to see the film in IMAX — not once, but 14 times. He was, she noted, an extreme case. But the behavior he represents — audiences actively seeking out premium presentation and going to significant logistical lengths to find it — is a market signal the industry has not yet fully met.

“You don’t want your fans to feel left out of an experience,” Rich said.

Acuna offered the corrective that often gets lost in the premium-format conversation: a standard auditorium still beats a living room by a significant margin. The risk is that the industry’s increasingly format-centric marketing inadvertently trains audiences to believe the standard presentation is not worth the trip.

“Something I worry about the narrative that happens is if you don’t go see a movie in the biggest format, it’s not worth it,” Acuna said. “As important as these big screens are, being there with other people, experiencing things in a huge screen that doesn’t necessarily have to be an RPX or an IMAX — it’s actually pretty special too.”

That tension — between premium as aspiration and theatrical as baseline value proposition — is one the industry has not fully resolved. The Regal Sherman Oaks renovation, with its four premium auditoriums and 12 screens that are not PLF or IMAX but are still very much not the sofa, is one exhibitor’s attempt at threading that needle.

Whether the industry builds more of them, and whether the content pipeline emerging from a post-merger landscape gives those screens enough to show, is the conversation that will outlast any single panel.

The post The Box Office Is Back. At a Renovated Regal Theatre, the Industry Asks What Comes Next appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

That system is no longer the only path – as filmmakers, distributors, festivals, and technology companies increasingly embrace a direct-to-audience pipeline. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the panel “The Evolution of Distribution: How a Direct-To-Audience Pipeline Will Energize Independent Film” set out to explore this model, one that allows creators to build communities, market films, sell tickets, and distribute content directly to viewers long before a traditional distributor enters the picture.

Held on 16 May, at Village Innovation as part of the Marché du Film (Cannes Film Market), the panel was hosted by Iddo Patt, co-founder and CEO of Eventive, a company that provides ticketing, streaming, and audience management tools for festivals, cinemas, and filmmakers. Working with festivals for the past decade – 6,000 festival editions across 50 countries – Patt reported that over 16 million tickets have been issued through the Eventive platform. “So we’ve developed a lot of ideas, a lot of data, around how people are interacting with movies today,” he said.

Joining him on stage was a diverse slate of guests from different parts of the independent film spectrum: John Nein, senior programmer and director of strategy at the Sundance Film Festival; producer and sales agent Sarah Mosses, CEO and founder of the UK-based Together Films; Daniel Berger, president of Oscilloscope Laboratories, a US-based distribution and media company; and Sharon ‘Rocky’ Roggio, founder and creative director of 1946 Studios, and also the director of the documentary “1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted a Culture.”

The Tension Between Old and New Models
As Berger noted, there is still a great deal of “antiquated thinking” in the exhibition and distribution sector. Not least, who works in the exhibition realm. “A lot of theatre programmers… It’s the same old white men that have been programming those same theatres for decades,” he said. “You talk about reaching a younger audience… These are not the people to do that, they don’t understand it.”

Mosses added that defining success in terms of gaining traditional distribution was also an outdated way of thinking. “The second an audience member has watched it, you’re in a form of distribution,” she argued, “and your success should start from that metric, rather than ‘Did I get a formal offer from a traditional partner? Did I get the streaming deal? Did I get the broadcast offer?’ They’re all different forms of consumption.”

The rise of virtual communities as an in-built audience for a film is another exciting development, remarked Nein. Take those who have built a YouTube following, like Danny and Michael Philippou, whose feature debut “Talk To Me” was launched at Sundance in 2022 and went on to gross $92 million worldwide, or more recent hits like “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” made respectively by Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, who also started cultivating fans for their work online.

“There is something exciting about virtual communities,” continued Nein. “To me, it has to do with this idea of how do you expand the audience? How do you bring people who don’t normally go to a film festival or go to a theatre that’s playing an independent film? Are they coming to a new place for them? And we often talk about that in terms of young audiences. People who might become interested in independent feature work by virtue of some other means, right? And I think that that’s what I see being different today, as opposed to twenty years ago.”

“1946” as a Direct-to-Audience Case Study
As Patt noted, with traditional distribution channels now turning upside down, “It makes a lot of sense for filmmakers to build an audience in a community before a film even plays at a festival.” Roggio’s success is the perfect case study in exploring the direct-to-audience pipeline. Released in 2022, “1946…” explored how the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in the Bible during the 1946 translation of the Revised Standard Version, arguing this was a mistranslation of Greek texts – a mistake that inadvertently fuelled decades of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

The controversial content immediately attracted viewers. “Before the movie even came out, we had hundreds of people telling us how much our movie was dumb, stupid, wrong,” Roggio recounted. With “pastors losing their minds” in Sunday morning sermons, on radio shows and podcasts, “1946…” was on everyone’s lips. “That was already a big win for us,” he said. An even bigger win came when an Australian TikTok user posted the film’s trailer, and it went viral – gaining 2 million views. When the film premiered at the 2022 Doc NYC festival, it won the Audience Award, the first of 25 awards.

The question remained: what next? “We wanted distribution,” said Roggio. “And if you sell too many tickets at a festival, are you going to get distribution? But I had an audience waiting to see this film, so I really wanted them to see the film. We ended up selling over 5,000 digital tickets at Doc NYC. We’re still the most viewed film in their festival history at the virtual end. They ended up opening an additional screening for us in person, which was huge, and we took a risk doing that, but it paid off.”

Despite employing publicists 42West, who helped ensure visibility, the reaction was disappointing from traditional distributors. “They said, ‘Love the film, can’t help you,’” said Roggio. As she previously explained at a Berlinale EFM talk, the film was considered risky – either “too gay or too Christian”. At this stage, Eventive stepped in. “Eventive contacted us,” said Roggio, “and said, ‘Listen, you obviously have an audience for this, so why don’t you do self-distribution?’”

Released in theatres in the US in December 2023 – to ensure qualifying for BAFTA and Oscars – Roggio also launched a virtual release, via Eventive, to help pay for the costs of entering the awards season. Turning the traditional distribution paradigm upside down was exactly the right strategy. In six months, “1946…” made $118,000 net profit from 500 watch parties – simultaneous virtual watch-along events – across 25 countries.

Crucially, Eventive also provided data: who watched the movie, how many times they watched the movie and for how long – and viewer’s email addresses. The production now has 15,000 subscribers on the film’s Mailchimp account. “I am excited, because we haven’t even hit our potential,” added Roggio. “I think maybe 100,000 people have seen the movie over watch parties, maybe 200,000. We need millions of people to see this movie, so we have a lot of work to do.”

The Three Rs: Reach, Revenue, and Reaction
During the panel, Sarah Mosses, founder and CEO of Together Films, suggested that filmmakers must begin every project by defining their primary intention. According to Mosses, most distribution goals fall into three categories:

• Reach
• Revenue
• Reaction

Some filmmakers prioritise prestige and awards recognition, which due to the expense of mounting an awards campaign will have an impact upon revenue. Others prioritize financial return. Others want to maximize social impact and audience engagement.

“Each film really is going to have a combination of all three, and you should have a combination,” said Mosses. “I advocate for everybody trying to make some form of money, that should be there. It should be the compounding of it, but you have to understand which of those things you’re aiming for to define your own success metrics within that process.”

A More Practical Way to Think About Audiences
Mosses also proposed a framework called CAST to help filmmakers think more strategically about audience segmentation.

• Commercial audiences
• Affected audiences
• Supportive audiences
• Tactical audiences

Commercial audiences are viewers most likely to buy tickets in traditional theatrical settings. Affected audiences are communities directly connected to the film’s subject matter or lived experience. Supportive audiences include advocacy groups, nonprofits, educational organizations, religious institutions, and community organizations that may organize screenings because they care about the issue. Tactical audiences are smaller groups — politicians, policymakers, corporate leaders, or influencers — whose engagement could create broader institutional change.

“We need to really think differently about how we categorize our audiences, so that we can plan distribution efforts that match who needs to see this,” Mosses added. “Because if we only solidly focus on a primary audience for theatrical, we might miss so many different windows that come around that.”

The Future
Mosses concluded by noting that further transparency is needed, including box office reports for each film playing at a festival. “That’s a level of success. How many people showed up to the festival? What was my total box office gross?” She also called for a more uniform way of looking at data in the industry.

Daniel Berger concurred: “You look at box office in Europe, and they tell you how many admissions there have been, how many people saw it. You look at box office in the US, they tell you how many dollars it made.” Given the vast array of ticket prices, it’s impossible to calculate admissions via the current US model. “I don’t know how many people see our films. I’ll never know, there’s no way to know.”

Overall, the panellists agreed that the direct-to-audience pipeline does not eliminate the need for festivals, distributors, or theatres. Festivals remain essential spaces for discovery, legitimacy, and communal viewing experiences, while distributors still provide expertise, relationships, marketing infrastructure, and access to broader markets.

Yet wider thinking is required. As Patt noted, “Ninety per cent of the films that are playing festivals overall are not getting formal or traditional distribution, even though they’ve been curated in a meaningful way. They’ve been selected for important reasons, they’re seen by a lot of people… and that’s part of what is driving this need for direct-to-audience opportunities that can then turn into theatrical.”

The post Can Direct-to-Audience Distribution Give Indie Films a New Path to Theatres? appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Sony Pictures Classics has been doing it anyway for more than three decades.

The deal that best captured the early days of the 79th Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film wasn’t made by SPC. It was made across from them — in the abstract, at least — when A24 dropped a reported $17 million to acquire Jordan Firstman’s “Club Kid” after a bidding war that drew Netflix, Searchlight, Focus Features and Mubi before the price tag rocketed into eight figures.

The news broke just as Sony Pictures Classics co-founders and co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, along with Dylan Leiner, EVP of Acquisitions, Production and Business Affairs, took the stage at the Palais des Festivals for a Marché du Film panel titled “How Sony Pictures Classics Navigates the World of Indie and International Cinema,” moderated by Los Angeles Times editor Matt Brennan.

The timing was pointed. For exhibitors wondering which model of independent distribution is actually built to last — the headline-chasing eight-figure swing or the slow-burn, evergreen play — the SPC response was instructive.

“When we acquire a movie, whether anyone else has offers, we try to block it out,” said Barker. “We have trained ourselves to not let that noise bother us. What is it worth to us? What do we think it’s going to do?”

“You Never Lose Money on a Movie You Didn’t Buy”
The panel began, appropriately, with Cannes stories. Barker recalled 1984, when he and Bernard were at the festival with Orion Pictures and thought they were going to acquire Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas.” Then 20th Century Fox “swooped in for three times our offer,” Barker said, and the film was gone.

But over lunch with French producer Serge Silberman at the Carlton Hotel, they learned Silberman was preparing Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran.” “At that lunch we bought the film,” Barker said. “He literally wrote the deal on a napkin at the restaurant at the Carlton Hotel. So I think we turned out okay.”

Leiner’s own Cannes acquisition story was more physical. During a screening of “Son of Saul,” he stepped out, called Barker and Bernard, and told them this was the film they needed to pursue. The after-party was closed and the gatekeepers wouldn’t let him in, so Leiner found another route. “The only way I was going to be able to get in was through the beach,” he said. “I was in my tux, and I waded through the ocean.”

He met director László Nemes and the sales team. Later that night, SPC bought the movie. “Son of Saul” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

These are not just good stories. They are the texture of an era in which Cannes was a smaller, stranger operation — and in which the deals that shaped international cinema were made by people who trusted their guts and worked the room. That instinct-first philosophy remains at the center of SPC’s methodology, now reinforced by Leiner’s financial modeling: scenario ranges on the low end and high end, followed by a disciplined decision about where SPC can make the numbers work.

Bernard put the guiding principle in terms Silberman himself might have appreciated: “He always said you never lose money on a movie you didn’t buy.”

That discipline may sound almost quaint in a marketplace where acquisitions increasingly double as brand announcements. But for exhibition, the SPC model carries a direct analog: programming discipline — knowing which films you can actually make work on your screens — is as valuable as chasing the next hot title. The specialty circuit’s healthiest operators have always known this.

The Festival as Intelligence Network
SPC acquired four films from this year’s Sundance and picked up South by Southwest premiere “Wishful Thinking” — five domestic festival acquisitions before Cannes opened. The trio’s account of how festivals actually drive those decisions is more pragmatic than romantic.

For Leiner, the value of in-person festivals crystallized at the first post-COVID Berlin International Film Festival. Several international distributors asked whether SPC had seen “The Teachers’ Lounge.” It wasn’t on their radar. They saw it quickly and acquired it; the film later earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film.

“Being at a festival and being in this fishbowl environment is really helpful,” Leiner said. “These films that we acquired at these domestic festivals recently — they were not planned. That’s what’s always amazing.”

The festival circuit, in other words, is not primarily a screening schedule. It is a distributed intelligence network — one that only functions when the right people are physically in the same room. For exhibitors making programming decisions months in advance, that same network helps determine which specialty titles arrive on their screens with genuine word-of-mouth velocity versus manufactured buzz. The difference often shows up in holdover performance.

Bernard described the festival ecosystem as one of fiercely guarded premiere politics and distinct personalities. Cannes carries the most weight, partly because of what Barker called the singular contribution of longtime selection chief Thierry Frémaux: “What he has done in the last 25 years has kept film relevant — for all of us and for the public.”

By the time the festival closed, Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord” had taken the Palme d’Or and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur” the Grand Prix — further confirmation, if any were needed, that the director-driven international cinema SPC has championed for decades remains Cannes’ defining currency. Neon extended its remarkable Cannes winning streak, reinforcing exactly the competitive dynamic the panel had been interrogating all morning: which acquisitions represent genuine long-term value, and which are brand positioning?

“Nuremberg,” Timing and the Evergreen Principle
No film in the session illustrated the SPC model more concretely than “Nuremberg,” the James Vanderbilt-directed courtroom drama starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, acquired at last year’s Cannes and released theatrically in November 2025. The film grossed more than $56 million globally — exceptional by contemporary specialty-market standards — and has continued to perform in ancillary markets, including airlines, where SPC deliberately holds rights.

“Nobody else was really interested in the movie,” Leiner said. The challenge was convincing the team behind a $40 million production to trust an independent distributor.

“We felt we were auditioning, like to get married to somebody,” said Bernard. “We said, sell it to us. We think it’s going to be a great success — and we’ll make your movie way more valuable over the test of time.”

Part of that value came from an unscripted source. At a Museum of Modern Art screening before release, Barker watched the audience react to Michael Shannon’s speech about the fragility of constitutional law by whispering “Trump.”

“That movie was timely for what Americans were going through,” Barker said. “Whatever side they were on at that moment — very timely. And that helped that film.” SPC bought advertising on both Fox News and MSNBC.

The lesson is the one SPC has been demonstrating for 30 years: a film with genuine evergreen potential — “Run Lola Run,” “Call Me by Your Name,” “Living” — can generate revenue long after its theatrical run closes. That long tail changes how even a modest opening looks on the full balance sheet.

Bernard was direct about pay-one windows: “We look at pay one as part of the theatrical release, in a sense. We continue to promote with all the different aspects of whoever our partner is… to get people to see it at home.” In the post-COVID marketplace, he argued, that window has become “a more valuable revenue stream than it ever was” — a point exhibitors negotiating window lengths with distributors should weigh carefully.

“Blue Moon” and the Art of the Planned Nomination
“Blue Moon,” Richard Linklater’s one-night biographical drama following lyricist Lorenz Hart on the opening night of “Oklahoma!,” earned Ethan Hawke his first Best Actor Oscar nomination at the 98th Academy Awards alongside a Best Original Screenplay nod for writer Robert Kaplow. For Barker, the nomination was not a surprise. It was a planned outcome.

“We sat down with Rick Linklater in 2024 and we said we’d like to make this movie,” Barker recalled. “Our confidence was that movie is going to be nominated for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. The screenplay was spectacular, and it was so obvious — we had to do that for Ethan. Twenty years earlier, we had ‘Capote’ with Philip Seymour Hoffman. This was a similar kind of spectacular performance.”

The airline strategy was deliberate. SPC placed “Blue Moon” on cross-country flights during the Oscar voting window.

Barker said, “I firmly believe the airline orchestrating it is what helped cause Ethan Hawke to get nominated — because we were all on all these planes and they were all watching ‘Blue Moon.'” Bernard called it “an old-school tactic” deployed with precision in the streaming age.

The implication for exhibitors is concrete: Oscar nominations remain one of the few mechanisms that can return a specialized title to screens multiple times — at announcement, through the ceremony, and after a win.

“That is more valuable than it’s ever been,” Bernard said, “because you can’t get onto that stage without being in that conversation with movies that the theater owners decide they should play.” At the end of the voting period, chains play all nominated films for a full week. That guaranteed screen time has to be earned upstream, through exactly the kind of long-range campaign architecture SPC described.

The Weekday Audience and the Repertory Rebound
The session’s most forward-looking thread concerned theatrical exhibition — and whether the signals Barker and Bernard are reading amount to a genuine structural shift or another false dawn.

At CinemaCon, SPC drew more exhibitor attendance at its specialized night presentation than perhaps ever before, a reflection of what Bernard described as a real change: commercial multiplexes beginning to program specialty content in earnest.

Barker flagged a metric with direct booking implications: “The Monday through Thursday gross on a specialized film could be as high as the weekend gross — never happened before.” Younger audiences, he argued, prefer to attend arthouse titles on weekdays. AMC has responded with senior Tuesday discounts. The weekday specialized audience is no longer a rounding error, and exhibitors who haven’t adjusted their midweek programming strategy accordingly may be leaving money on the table.

Then there is the repertory renaissance. “There’s a new generation that’s learning about cinema the way it happened back in the late ’60s and ’70s,” said Bernard. AMC has offered SPC 170 of its largest screens for a week-long “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” run. SPC is reissuing “Trainspotting” in June on 400 commercial screens and planning a similar outing for “The Piano.”

“It’s not just the older crowd,” Barker said. “It’s younger people that want to see this on a big screen with great sound.”

“Becoming Led Zeppelin” offered the proof of concept. When SPC acquired the documentary, some wondered what the company was doing taking on a rock legacy film. Bernard helped engineer an IMAX strategy that Barker said “blew people’s mind,” and the release became, in Barker’s words, “one of the most successful independent films of the last decade” — establishing a template that SPC then replicated for its Elvis Presley documentary.

“It has rejuvenated the documentary form,” Leiner said. “The key is to eventize these movies — the smallest one to the biggest one. Now is the time when distributors can be more creative than they’ve ever been.”

Bernard offered exhibitors a pointed challenge alongside the optimism: make moviegoing more fun, and find better ways to tell audiences what is playing before their friends have to tell them for you. The infrastructure for discovery still lags behind the appetite.

The Neon Question
An audience question — from Andrew Frank of Mongrel Media — cut directly to the competitive landscape: Is it sustainable for Neon to acquire every major Palme d’Or contender at Cannes year after year?

Bernard reached for history. “I’d say you should asked the people who used to be at Miramax — that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Barker passed entirely. “As long as we’ve been in the business, there’s always been someone saying they’re gonna buy everything on the Croisette. Good luck.”

Leiner offered the more analytically useful frame. A24’s ability to pay $17 million for “Club Kid” was underwritten, in part, by the fact that its international sales arm had already received territory offers before the final deal was closed.

“They’re basically plugging into an existing deal, which is hugely valuable to a US distributor,” Leiner said. “There’s already a sense of how much they can lay off.”

The headline number, in other words, may not tell the whole story — a reminder that acquisition economics in 2026 are increasingly opaque to outside observers.

SPC does not buy for headlines or to establish a floor. It buys films it thinks it can make work: on airlines, in repertory houses, across Oscar campaigns, in territories that open wide once domestic momentum builds — and on screens where the work of getting the audience there has already begun long before opening weekend.

Sony Pictures Classics is not pretending the business has not changed. Barker, Bernard and Leiner spoke like executives who understand that every revenue stream matters, every window must be managed, and every audience must be found. But they also made clear that survival in specialty distribution still begins with taste — not nostalgia, not romanticism, and not the fear of losing a bidding war.

The “Club Kid” deal will generate more column inches in the next month than “Nuremberg” did in six. The question for the film industry is which one is still in rotation in 2030.

That, more than any bidding-war headline, is the Sony Pictures Classics business model.

The post The Long Game: How Sony Pictures Classics Still Wins at Cannes appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

That tension — between genuine artistic achievement and reduced commercial energy — defined the 2026 edition more than any single film or controversy. Cannes has weathered quieter years before. The more interesting question is what this particular quietness reveals about the state of the industry surrounding it.

The Competition: Strong Films, No Runaway Favorite
Let’s be clear about the quality on offer. “Fjord” was a worthy Palme winner — a morally precise, formally controlled portrait of a Romanian immigrant family caught in conflict with Norwegian child welfare authorities, and a film that put some of Europe’s most contested social questions on painfully intimate terms. Mungiu, now only the tenth filmmaker to win the Palme twice, gave the jury — presided over by South Korean director Park Chan-wook — a film that felt both rigorously authored and genuinely urgent. At the post-awards press conference, Park was characteristically direct about the deliberations: “Quite honestly, I really didn’t want to award the Palme d’Or to any film. Why? Because I’ve never won one myself! But anyway, we had no choice! And of course, ‘Fjord’ definitely deserved the Palme d’Or.”

The Grand Prix went to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” a Russian drama that unflinchingly dissects the moral vacuity of Putin’s elite class against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Zvyagintsev’s return to Cannes after a multiyear absence — and his pointed message to Putin from the stage — gave the ceremony its most galvanizing moment. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” claimed the Best Actress prize for its two leads, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, a three-hour meditation on empathy and end-of-life care that provoked heated argument at every afterparty unfortunate enough to host a conversation about it. Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” a scant 82-minute black-and-white period piece set in postwar Germany, shared the Best Director prize and was, by many accounts, the most devastating single cinematic experience the festival produced.

Any of those three — “Fjord,” “Minotaur,” “All of a Sudden” — could have walked away with the Palme and generated no serious argument. What’s notable is that none of them produced the kind of pre-closing-ceremony consensus that “Parasite” or “Anatomy of a Fall” generated. The jury spread prizes liberally — both acting awards were shared, Best Director was split between Pawlikowski and Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for “La Bola Negra” — which reflected the competition’s genuine quality but also its lack of a single dominant voice. That’s not a condemnation of the lineup. It’s an honest description of a year in which the competition was strong across the board but yielded no film that simply ran away from the field.

That matters commercially, because Cannes’ ability to launch a film into a full awards-season cycle depends heavily on that consensus forming early. “Fjord,” “Minotaur” and “All of a Sudden” will all compete for year-end attention, and they are genuinely good films. But they will need to build their audiences rather than arrive with the momentum that a clearer Cannes favorite generates. 

Elsewhere, the jury continued to spread the wealth. The Best Director prize was shared between Pawlikowski and Los Javis for “La Bola Negra,” while Valeska Grisebach’s “The Dreamed Adventure” took the Jury Prize and Emmanuel Marre won Best Screenplay for “A Man of His Time.” Lukas Dhont’s “Coward” produced one of the festival’s shared acting honors, with Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne splitting Best Actor. At the jury press conference, Chloé Zhao said the jury was moved by “the tenderness in the relationships depicted in these films,” adding that they fell in love not only with the performances, but with the relationships themselves. 

In Un Certain Regard, Sandra Wollner’s “Everytime” took the top prize, while Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s “Ben’Imana” won the Caméra d’Or, marking a historic first for Rwanda at Cannes.

The Commercial Story Was in the Sidebars
Away from the main competition, the festival’s most unapologetically commercial film found its buyer quickly and loudly. Jordan Firstman’s “Club Kid,” a sharply funny New York dramedy about a gay club promoter who discovers he has a 10-year-old son, was the festival’s clearest crowd-pleaser and its most legible genre crossover — part comedy, part coming-of-age, entirely watchable. A24 acquired the title, and the logic is self-evident: it sits at the intersection of comedy, queer identity and social-media shareability that younger specialty audiences respond to, and it doesn’t require a lengthy critical consensus to find its opening weekend. Don’t be surprised if “Club Kid” ends up with the kind of theatrical upside most of the competition titles will struggle to reach.

The broader acquisition landscape also reflected how distributors are reading the current market. Mubi acquired worldwide rights to Lukas Dhont’s “Coward” and key territories on Na Hong-jin’s divisive alien-invasion spectacle “Hope” before the festival even opened — a signal that the platform is increasingly operating as a fully-integrated specialty distributor with genuine theatrical ambitions. Meanwhile, Neon’s Palme d’Or winning streak now extends to seven consecutive years, a run that defies coincidence and points instead to an acquisition strategy that has cracked the code for converting Croisette credibility into awards-season momentum. The company now has “Fjord” to work with through the fall and winter, and its track record suggests they will know exactly what to do with it.

The Hollywood Hole: Does It Actually Matter?
For the first time since 2017, no major Hollywood studio brought a tentpole to Cannes. The reasons clustered around a familiar set of calculations: the cost of mounting a full studio contingent now exceeds $1 million; Hollywood increasingly prefers managed digital rollouts to the unpredictable press gauntlet of the Croisette; and the lingering bruises from “Joker: Folie à Deux” have made certain studio executives newly cautious about high-profile festival exposure.

Mergers and acquisitions — Netflix-Warner Bros., Paramount-Skydance — absorbed executive attention that might otherwise have gone into planning a Cannes premiere. The Cinéma de la Plage screened the original “Top Gun” and the first “Fast & Furious” as gestures of nostalgia. It was a bit like serving airline peanuts to guests accustomed to a four-course dinner.

Streamers were similarly absent from the conversation in ways they hadn’t been in recent years, with Netflix, Amazon and Apple all registering a significantly reduced presence in events and deal-making. Festival director Thierry Frémaux reframed the Hollywood absence as a return to identity — “beyond the studios and Los Angeles, cinema does exist” — and there is something to that argument. The competition genuinely reflected a global filmmaking community that does not require Hollywood permission to produce important work.

But the commercial reality is more complicated, and the industry would be doing itself a disservice to pretend otherwise. Major studio and streamer titles function, among other things, as audience-acquisition infrastructure for the more esoteric parts of the program. When international media arrives to cover a Mission: Impossible installment and ends up filing dispatches about a Romanian family drama set in Norway, that is Cannes working exactly as designed. Without the star power, the global press coverage thins, and with it the cultural oxygen that helps festival-endorsed films find audiences worldwide. Berlin faced the same dynamic this past February and reached a similar accommodation. If both flagship European festivals can run without Hollywood and still post record attendance numbers, the question of who needs whom becomes worth asking out loud. But it is a question, not yet an answer.

The Market: Private Capital, Co-Productions and Europe’s Funding Fight
At the Marché du Film, the headline figures were record-breaking — 16,000 accredited participants from over 140 countries, 1,700 buyers and 600 exhibiting companies. But the more revealing story was structural. With pre-sales contracting and streamers buying less, independent films are increasingly turning to high-net-worth individuals, family offices and private equity to close their financing gaps. The fourth edition of the Marché’s Investors’ Circle was its most heavily attended yet, presenting eight feature projects to a closed VIP audience with budgets ranging from €1 million to over €12 million.

Mubi formalized its co-financing ambitions with a multi-year pact alongside IPR.VC, the Finland and UK-based investment fund, to back a slate of European films beginning with Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” and Felix van Groeningen’s “Let Love In.” The European Investment Fund committed €25 million to the latest IPR.VC fund — a meaningful institutional endorsement of the model.

The wider European industry arrived at Cannes with a political agenda as well as a commercial one. An open letter titled “Cinema needs Europe, Europe needs cinema” was published on the eve of the festival with around 4,700 signatures — Francis Ford Coppola, Juliette Binoche, Yorgos Lanthimos, Sandra Hüller, Pawlikowski, Rodrigo Sorogoyen and many others — defending the EU’s Creative Europe MEDIA programme against its planned absorption into a broader funding structure called AgoraEU, where the film share would not be ring-fenced. That may sound like a Brussels procedural dispute. It isn’t. MEDIA has been the backbone financing infrastructure for prestige European cinema for 35 years, and its dilution would have direct, measurable consequences for the independent film supply chain.

Japan was the 2026 Country of Honour, arriving with a roughly 50 percent increase in delegation attendance and the launch of the Japan IP Market, co-organized with TIFFCOM across three days. Participants included Kadokawa, Shochiku, Toei and Nippon Animation, and the event served as a useful reminder that the most commercially potent theatrical IP emerging right now may not originate in Burbank. Japan’s anime industry is a $25 billion business growing at 15 percent annually, and the theatrical upside — as “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” demonstrated last summer — remains considerable.

Looking Ahead: The Delayed Payoff
The 79th Cannes was undeniably quieter than its 2025 predecessor, which delivered a run of films that dominated the international awards season and generated the kind of sustained critical conversation that drives specialty box office for months. The absence of Hollywood star power reduced global media coverage, and the competition’s lack of a consensus breakout made it harder to generate the early momentum that turns a Cannes premiere into a cultural event.

None of that means the films aren’t there. “Fjord,” “Minotaur,” “All of a Sudden” and “Fatherland” are works that travel well and reward the kind of engaged audiences that the specialty market exists to serve. “Club Kid” has A24’s marketing machine behind it and the instincts of a film built to play beyond the arthouse bubble. Several of 2026’s competition titles will go on to be among the year’s most discussed films — they just haven’t fully announced themselves yet. Cannes has always been better at planting seeds than harvesting them. The harvest, as usual, comes later.

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The Norway-set drama, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, centers on a Romanian family whose move to a Norwegian village exposes a widening gulf between cultural tradition, state authority and contemporary ideas of care, punishment and belonging. In a competition full of moral gray zones, geopolitical unease and families under pressure, “Fjord” gave the jury a work that felt both classically Cannes and very much of the current moment.

In accepting the award, Mungiu framed the film as a call for tolerance at a moment of ideological hardening. Speaking after the ceremony, he described “Fjord” as “a plea for tolerance, inclusion and empathy,” adding that people need to “double-check your beliefs every now and then” when confronting opposing views.

The win also extended one of the most unlikely streaks in modern specialty distribution: Neon has now backed the Palme d’Or winner for seven consecutive years, following “Parasite,” “Titane,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Anora,” “It Was Just an Accident” and now “Fjord.” At some point, a streak becomes less a coincidence than an acquisition strategy with unnervingly good timing.

This year’s competition jury was presided over by South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, the first Korean artist to serve as Cannes jury president. He was joined by Demi Moore, Ruth Negga, Laura Wandel, Chloé Zhao, Diego Céspedes, Isaach De Bankolé, Paul Laverty and Stellan Skarsgård. Together, the nine-member jury selected the winners from 22 films in competition during a festival that ran from May 12 to 23.

At the jury’s post-awards press conference, Park offered the kind of deadpan candor one hopes for after nearly two weeks of Croisette solemnity. “Quite honestly, I really didn’t want to award the Palme d’Or to any film,” he said. “Why? Because I’ve never won one myself! But anyway, we had no choice! And of course, ‘Fjord’ definitely deserved the Palme d’Or.”

That line landed as a joke, but it also pointed to the task facing this year’s jury. The 2026 competition did not produce one overwhelming consensus title so much as a cluster of strong, difficult, politically alert films. The jury’s solution was to spread the wealth. Sometimes that can look like indecision. This year, with so many ties and shared awards, it also looked like a jury unwilling to pretend that one film, one performance or even one directing achievement had clearly settled the argument.

The Grand Prix, Cannes’ second-place prize, went to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” a Russian drama set against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Zvyagintsev used his acceptance speech to directly address Vladimir Putin, saying, “Put an end to this slaughter.” The moment gave the ceremony one of its clearest political charges, a reminder that Cannes may be a festival of cinema, but it has rarely been able, or willing, to keep the world outside the Palais.

The Best Director Prize was shared by Paweł Pawlikowski for “Fatherland” and Spanish filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for “La Bola Negra.” For Pawlikowski, the award marked a return to a Cannes prize he previously won for “Cold War” in 2018. For Calvo and Ambrossi, better known collectively as Los Javis, it marked a major international breakthrough with their first Cannes competition entry.

The split may have been the first real indication that Park’s jury was less interested in hierarchy than in mapping the contours of its own enthusiasm. Pawlikowski and Los Javis do not exactly occupy the same cinematic neighborhood. One represents a severe, formalist European tradition; the other a more expansive, contemporary Spanish sensibility. Awarding both was either a compromise or a statement and, in Cannes terms, those are often the same thing.

The Jury Prize went to Valeska Grisebach’s “The Dreamed Adventure”, while Emmanuel Marre won Best Screenplay for “A Man of His Time.” The CST Award for Best Artist-Technician also went to “A Man of His Time” editor Nicolas Rumpl, with the commission praising the film’s “subtle editorial choices.”

Both acting prizes were shared as well. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto won Best Performance by an Actress for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden”, while Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne won Best Performance by an Actor for Lukas Dhont’s “Coward.” The double-duo result gave the evening the faint air of a jury that had started handing out prizes and then realized it did not want to stop. Yet the explanation made sense. Chloé Zhao said the jury was moved by “the tenderness in the relationships depicted in these films,” adding, “We fell in love not only with the actors but especially with the loving relationships we saw on screen.”

In his own remarks, Macchia said he hoped “Coward” would help young people “learn to love themselves,” a sentiment that fit neatly with the jury’s stated interest in performances built not around star turns, but around emotional connection. Cannes acting prizes can sometimes feel like coronations. This year they felt more like acknowledgments of chemistry — of performances that only fully existed in relation to another person.

Beyond the main competition, the Caméra d’Or, awarded to the best first feature across the festival’s sections, went to Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s “Ben’Imana,” the first film from Rawanda to ever be selected by Cannes. The Short Film Palme d’Or was awarded to Federico Luis for “Para Los Contrincantes.”

In Un Certain Regard, Sandra Wollner’s “Everytime” took the section’s top prize. Abinash Bikram Shah’s debut feature “Elephants in the Fog” won the Jury Prize, while Louis Clichy’s “Iron Boy” received the Special Jury Prize. Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won Best Actor for “Congo Boy,” and the Best Actress award was shared by Marina de Tavira, Daniela Marín Navarro and Mariangel Villegas for Valentina Maurel’s “Siempre Soy Tu Animal Materno.”

The 2026 edition opened on May 12 with “The Electric Kiss” and unfolded under a festival poster honoring “Thelma & Louise,” featuring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis from Ridley Scott’s 1991 Cannes closer. Geena Davis appeared during the closing ceremony, while Barbra Streisand, who had been due to receive an honorary Palme d’Or, was honored in absentia after a knee injury prevented her from traveling.

If the festival’s 79th edition did not deliver the kind of broad Hollywood presence or consensus breakout that sometimes defines Cannes, its final awards reflected a familiar Croisette pattern: politically engaged cinema, fiercely authored films and a jury willing to divide the spoils rather than anoint a single dominant narrative.

At the jury press conference, Ruth Negga likened the experience to “one masterclass after another,” while Isaach De Bankolé described the jury room as “a microcosm, a tiny world made up of nine people with their own ideas and suggestions.” He added that the group came away with “even more ideas,” and spoke of the value of listening and, when necessary, changing one’s mind. That may be the most generous way to read this year’s abundance of shared prizes. Less a failure to choose than a public record of the jury’s internal negotiations.

For Mungiu, however, the night ultimately belonged to a very select club. With “Fjord,” he became only the tenth filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or twice, joining a lineage that Cannes reserves for artists whose work does more than survive the Croisette’s pressure cooker. It leaves with the festival’s highest endorsement — and, thanks to Neon’s remarkable run, with a ready-made awards-season narrative already waiting on the other side of the red carpet.

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