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.

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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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There is a version of this story that writes itself: six talented women, a glamorous gala at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes, Demi Moore and Alicia Vikander somewhere in the frame. That version exists, and the photographs prove it.

But the more consequential story from the Red Sea Film Foundation’s 2026 Women in Cinema spotlight — the press day on May 13 and the gala on May 14, both held on the sidelines of the 79th Cannes Film Festival — is the one that doesn’t photograph as neatly. It’s about distribution infrastructure that still hasn’t caught up to the talent it’s supposed to carry. It’s about film industries developing in real time, without a playbook, under the scrutiny of a global press that doesn’t always understand what it’s looking at. And it’s about whether an event like this — a luncheon, a press day, an evening gala — can do more than produce a beautiful set of portraits.

This year’s honorees are Kamila Andini (Indonesia), Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo (Rwanda), Aixa Kay (Saudi Arabia), Laïla Marrakchi (Morocco), Genevieve Nnaji (Nigeria), and Tara Sutaria (India). It marks the first edition in which three of the six spotlight honorees are from the African continent — a milestone the Foundation was not shy about noting.

The question worth asking is what comes after the spotlight turns off. What emerged across three interviews was not a single story of representation, but an argument for specificity: that films from Nigeria, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco should not have to become more generic in order to become more global.

“Nobody Knows Us — We Need to Be Seen”
Genevieve Nnaji, whose 2018 film “Lionheart” became Netflix’s first original acquisition from Nigeria, has spent the better part of a decade navigating the gap between Nollywood’s enormous domestic audience and the industry’s persistent tendency to treat African cinema as a monolithic regional curiosity rather than a collection of distinct national cultures. At Cannes this week, she was direct about why festivals like this one still matter, even in a streaming era that theoretically flattens geographic barriers.

“Some, you have to take the film to them,” Nnaji said. “People won’t know you until you bring it to them. So festivals, for us especially, are very, very important — still important. It’s a way to also go and meet people, your peers really, who you might collaborate with, who probably never heard of your country before, but they see this film and they’re like, wait, hold up, I know that story.”

That tension — between the need for external validation and the risk of ceding the narrative to outside gatekeepers — ran through nearly every conversation at the event. Tara Sutaria, whose upcoming bilingual film “Toxic” is set for worldwide theatrical release, framed it as a creative calibration problem rather than a structural one. “We create the narrative, right?” she said. “It comes down to us being able to manage two things: one is to tell our story with our perspective and our narrative, and to shape that ourselves, while also amalgamating and mixing with people and cultures from world over, so that we get to tell the story accurately, but also start the conversation and communication of what it is to tell stories together.”

Both women were careful to distinguish between the visibility that Cannes offers and the deeper infrastructure questions that visibility alone cannot resolve. “In Nigeria, we still have the issue of distribution and everything,” Nnaji acknowledged. “There’s a lot more problems that we’re facing. But I think the synergy — people just collaborating, trying to figure out how we can work together, regardless of gender, to be honest — is what’s taken the forefront right now.”

Rwanda’s First Generation
Of all the filmmakers gathered this week, the one with the most structurally unusual Cannes presence is Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo. Her debut feature, “Ben’Imana” — a Kinyarwanda title meaning, roughly, “the people of God” or “the lucky ones” — is screening in Un Certain Regard, Cannes’ major discovery-focused sidebar and one of its most reliable pipelines for international breakthrough.

Dusabejambo did not arrive at cinema through a conventional route. She was studying mathematics and waiting to enroll in an electronics and telecommunications program when a Tribeca Film Institute call for stories — focused on resilience — drew her in. “My friends said, ‘You always read books, why don’t you write a story?'” she recalled. “And that’s how I started. So I didn’t really think, like, when I would do a film, it’s going to be this. It keeps on changing.”

What has remained consistent across her work, she said, is a preoccupation with people who find themselves trapped inside conflicts they did not create. “It’s more about people who find themselves in a conflict they didn’t start, and how they fight to get out of those conflicts — they have to live with those labels, those names, and everything, and then have to always find their place in a society.”

“Ben’Imana” carries additional weight as an artifact of representation. Dusabejambo is part of what she calls Rwanda’s first generation of feature filmmakers, and she is acutely aware that the choices she makes now will function as precedent. “We are stepping into this big platform, this industry world, and we have to come as who we are without trying to copy others,” she said. “Whether we do fiction, whether we do documentaries, this is going to be the trope for the next generation. So it’s a responsibility — to really create a door for those who will come after us, so that when they step in, they are not taken into the statistics of ‘African films,’ because Rwanda has its own culture.”

The point lands with particular force at a festival that has historically struggled to distinguish between the continent and the country. “Burundi, Congo, Egypt — Africa is different,” she continued. “But there is a box that has been there for a long time.”

Art, Politics, and the Filmmakers Who Pretend Otherwise
Kamila Andini, the Indonesian filmmaker and producer whose critically lauded art-house work includes “The Mirror Never Lies” and “The Seen and Unseen,” spent three years directing a Netflix series — a detour that raised questions she was still working through when we spoke. The platform came to her, she explained, because it wanted a director with an art-house vision for a story about women. “That’s also my question — is it real?” she said. “But then they gave a lot of room for me to create the project, and it’s such a new experience for me.”

The exchange between Andini and Dusabejambo on the subject of “message” filmmaking was one of the sharpest moments of the press day — a genuine disagreement, or at least a productive tension, between two filmmakers who approach the question differently.

Dusabejambo argued that art and politics are inseparable, and that pretending otherwise is where the real danger lies. “In conversation, most of the time, people want to dissociate art and politics,” she said. “But art is politics — because the politics, all they want is to get into people’s minds, convince people, get people’s will. And for us, to get people to sit for 90 minutes to watch our films, we want their will. What are we serving them on the table? That is very important. So dissociating the two — that’s where lies the problem. You can do things, but if the way you put words and names on things is wrong, then it’s going to be like an entertainment soft poison.”

Andini’s counterpoint was that the binary itself is the problem. “Even when you make a commercial movie, there’s always a message,” she said. “Pretty Woman also talks about social class. It’s just a matter of which one is in the front.” The real failure mode, she suggested, is the filmmaker who doesn’t realize what they’re actually saying. “What’s dangerous is if a filmmaker doesn’t realize that they’re actually talking about something — they don’t realize that they’re talking about politics, they don’t realize they’re talking about a certain issue, and they just make it as entertainment.”

It is an argument Andini came to through practice as much as theory. As a young filmmaker in Jakarta, she learned her craft from Hollywood and European cinema — and then ran into the limits of that education the moment she tried to imagine something as simple as a first date. “In your mind, a date is going to the park, talking together,” she said. “But then you realize it’s not the same around you. We don’t go to the park. We don’t even have a good park in Jakarta, with a bench where you can sit and talk. We have different ways of dating. And that’s what I want to see.”

That may be the most compact version of the specificity argument made across the entire press day. Not a manifesto. Just a filmmaker noticing that the image in her head didn’t belong to her own life — and deciding to change that.

The Saudi Exception
Aixa Kay occupies a singular position in this year’s cohort. A writer and actor who has split her career between Canada and Saudi Arabia, she is, in effect, a participant in two film industries simultaneously — one mature and underinvestment-weary, one developing at a pace that observers outside the region are still scrambling to accurately characterize.

On the Canadian side, she was unsparing. Despite years of work there, she described a casting culture in which actors who looked like her were systematically confined to roles defined by their otherness — refugees, immigrants, people whose presence in a story required an explanation. “We were not given opportunities to work in roles outside the narrative of being a refugee or an immigrant,” she said. “Just a story about a person who was a participant of life — without an apology for why they are in the story.”

The Saudi industry, she argued, has a counterintuitive advantage: it gets to start later, and therefore can learn from the mistakes of established industries rather than repeat them. “Our film industry is starting where other people have finished,” she said. “Lessons learned already from the adventures and the wars that were fought before us — so that’s a good thing.”

She also pushed back, emphatically, against what she characterized as a shallow and outdated North American perception of Saudi Arabia — one that reduces it to a financial proposition. “The truth is Saudi Arabia does have a lot of money, and there’s no apology for that,” she said. “But it’s also money with good management. When they come and enter into Saudi Arabia and work with them towards making cinema and writing and collaborating, people who understand and see it — it’s beyond the money, it’s the combined vision for a better future.”

Of note for industry observers: the first film school to open in Saudi Arabia was a women’s institution — the School of Cinematic Arts at Effat University in Jeddah — a detail that runs counter to most Western assumptions about the market’s trajectory, and one that helps explain the notable female representation on Saudi productions in recent years. “The first graduates that were very well trained were from a women’s school,” Kay said. “When they needed people on the crew side, they needed people with different specializations — and so that, I think, is a good enough idea of what was the first push of women that went into the workforce.”

What the Foundation Is Actually Selling
The word “selling” is not meant pejoratively here. The Red Sea International Film Festival and its associated Foundation have, since launching in 2021, pursued a strategy that is less about acquiring prestige in the traditional sense and more about building a parallel infrastructure — one that operates in the margins of the major festival circuit and gradually makes those margins less marginal. That is a genuine service to global cinema, and it is also, plainly, an institutional project with interests of its own. Both things are true.

The Women in Cinema initiative is a meaningful piece of that strategy, not simply because it generates goodwill, but because it creates genuine connectivity between filmmakers who would not otherwise share a professional network. Nnaji made the point plainly when asked what the initiative had offered her: “Opportunities to meet people like her,” she said, gesturing toward Sutaria. “Having conversations that I didn’t think was possible, because I would never have met them otherwise.”

That may sound like the soft benefit of a networking luncheon, and it is. But for industries where the absence of international co-production infrastructure remains a genuine ceiling on scale, the networking luncheon is not nothing. It is, in some cases, the mechanism by which the next collaboration gets funded.

For an industry audience, that word — distribution — is not incidental. It is the central business problem that governs whether films from these markets reach paying audiences, whether international visibility can be converted into commercial opportunity, and whether the theatrical window remains a viable part of their commercial lifecycle.

Sutaria put it in terms that are hard to argue with. “I think this Women in Cinema gala is so exciting, because I can already sense from the women that I’ve met that we’re going to take these conversations further and actually lead them to fruition, and make things happen in cinema together.”

The awards ceremony is still ahead. “Ben’Imana” still awaits its Cannes fate. Several of these careers are at inflection points. Whether this particular Cannes will be remembered as a turning point for any of them remains an open question — but the conversation happening in the margins of the 79th festival suggests the industry’s center of gravity is shifting, one co-production deal, one distribution agreement, one festival slot at a time.

Genevieve Nnaji offered something close to a mission statement for all of it: “At the end of the day, we kind of direct the world to where it’s headed. We train minds to view life in a different perspective — that’s what stories do. People can only believe what they see, so we show them what’s possible.”

Celluloid Junkie spoke with Kamila Andini, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, Aixa Kay, Genevieve Nnaji and Tara Sutaria, at the Red Sea Film Foundation’s Women in Cinema luncheon on May 13, 2026, at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

The post At Cannes, Red Sea’s Women in Cinema Spotlight Makes the Case for a Wider Film Map appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

In 2026, that argument has never needed making more urgently. And it has rarely been harder to make with a straight face.

The 79th edition of the Festival de Cannes opens today against the backdrop of an industry in structural convulsion. The major Hollywood studios are absent from the official selection in any meaningful sense; no summer blockbusters, no Tom Cruise, no franchise prestige play designed to ride the red carpet into the global marketplace. Artificial intelligence, which tore through Hollywood’s guild negotiations in 2023 and was provisionally contained by contract language, has re-emerged with renewed force as those same contracts approach renegotiation. The streaming platforms that spent half a decade disrupting the theatrical window are themselves retreating from volume acquisition, leaving a market that is simultaneously more open and more uncertain than it has been in a generation.

And yet: 22 films are in competition for the Palme d’Or, selected from 2,541 submissions across 141 countries. This year’s jury is led by Park Chan-wook — the first South Korean filmmaker ever to hold that role — alongside Demi Moore and Stellan Skarsgård, among others. The Marché du Film is expected to host some 15,000 industry professionals over nine days. Television cameras will be hunting Mike White and the cast of the latest season of “The White Lotus,” parts of which will be filmed here on the Croisette this spring, with fictional characters attending a fictional version of the very festival currently in progress.

Life imitates art. Cannes sells the rights.

The Absence That Defines the Room
Cannes has always been in implicit negotiation with Hollywood — the festival that takes itself most seriously has always needed the industry that takes itself most profitably. This year, those terms have broken down.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger,” David Fincher’s “Cliff Booth” — these are films that were once circling the festival and are now circling other dates on the calendar. In some cases, major studio films were not finished in time. In others, studios no longer see the point of spending millions to launch movies months before release, only to risk having them booed, dissected or dismissed by international critics before their marketing campaigns have even begun.

Since COVID, a handful of studio tentpoles have learned that Cannes prestige does not always translate into commercial momentum. “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and Pixar’s “Elemental” both launched in 2023 to difficult festival receptions. Warner Bros.’ “Furiosa” arrived in 2024 with critical respect but without the box office lift the studio might have hoped for. The lesson has been absorbed.

Thierry Frémaux has addressed Hollywood’s absence with a combination of diplomatic equanimity and barely suppressed nostalgia. “Of course, I feel nostalgic for that golden age when studios used to produce a lot of films, every month, auteur films,” he told Deadline after the April lineup announcement. “My generation, we grew up loving cinema and loving cinema was loving American cinema.” This morning he said simply: “I hope the studio films come back.”

His consolation is structural: the Cannes-to-Oscar pipeline has never been more productive. “Anora” won the Palme in 2024 before sweeping the Academy Awards. “Sentimental Value” won the Jury Prize in 2025 before claiming the Best International Feature Oscar. Universal Pictures’ contribution to this year’s festival, meanwhile, is a midnight anniversary screening of the 25-year-old original “Fast and the Furious.” The gap between that and a world premiere speaks for itself.

The real question some are asking is whether American movies have simply gotten worse — or, more precisely, whether the studios are making fewer of the kinds of movies Cannes was built to celebrate. The 2025 lineup featured U.S. titles starring Tom Cruise and directed by Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Kelly Reichardt. Not a single one made it to the Academy Awards in March, while Cannes titles in French, Norwegian and Persian dominated the nominations.

Frémaux’s bottom line is difficult to argue with: “When studios have a smaller presence at Cannes, it’s because they’re simply less active in the kind of cinema that used to allow them to come here.”

A Competition That Has an Argument to Make
The 22-film competition is not a consolation prize for Hollywood’s absence. It is a deliberate ideological statement — and a strong one.

Frémaux opened his April announcement by defending “the freedom of human creativity in filmmaking” and “the in-theater experience” before naming a single title. Those two ideas — human creativity and theatrical exhibition — are the organizing principles of everything that follows.

The thematic spine of this year’s competition is not geography so much as moral reckoning across political borders. Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” follows Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, played by Sandra Hüller, returning to Cold War Germany. Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” his first English-language film, sends a devout Romanian-Norwegian couple into a small Norwegian village where their child-rearing methods draw suspicion. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” his first feature since 2017’s “Loveless,” arrives after a near-fatal COVID illness and the director’s exile from Russia to France. These are films about displacement, conformity and the violence that states and communities visit on individuals who do not fit.

Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” brings his fifth competition appearance and his most politically proximate subject to date: the aftermath of the November 2015 Bataclan attacks in Paris, with Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel and Catherine Deneuve as survivors. Playing in the year of an Iran-U.S. war, with that cast, it arrives weighted with context that extends well beyond its runtime.

Japan’s three competition representatives — Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Sheep in a Box” and Koji Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” — reflect the ongoing consolidation of East Asian cinema as a dominant force in world auteur filmmaking. Hamaguchi’s film, his first shot outside Japan and his first since “Drive My Car” won the Best International Feature Oscar, has already been acquired by Neon, giving it front-runner status before anyone outside a small inner circle has seen a frame.

The most broadly anticipated competition title may be Na Hong-jin’s “Hope.” Na has not made a film since “The Wailing” in 2016, and all three of his previous features screened at Cannes without ever making it into competition. “Hope” is a genre thriller set near the North Korean border, shot by Hong Kyung-pyo of “Parasite” and scored by Michael Abels of “Get Out” and “Us,” with a cast spanning Hwang Jung-min, Jung Ho-yeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, it has the architecture of an event.

Of the two American competition entries, Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love” carries the greater personal weight: set in late-1980s New York at the height of the AIDS crisis, starring Rami Malek as a beloved queer entertainer determined to mount one last play while dying. “If you live within the context of American independent cinema, you feel a little bit alone, to be honest,” Sachs said ahead of the festival. “As soon as you start to think of yourself within a broader community of people all over the world, it just becomes exciting.” James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” his fifth time in the main lineup, brings Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller into a Russian mafia crime saga that revisits the territory of Gray’s early career films “Little Odessa” and “We Own the Night.”

Taken together, the lineup is not trying to replace Hollywood glamour. It is trying to make the case that Cannes does not need to.

The Oscar Rule Change, and Why It May Influence the Jury Itself
A new Academy Award rule announced this month adds a dimension to the Palme d’Or race that goes beyond the usual post-festival awards calculus.

For the first time, the Palme d’Or winner — if in a foreign language — will automatically be eligible for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, without needing a country of origin to submit it as its official entry. The rule closes the loophole that previously disadvantaged “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme but was not France’s official Oscar submission and therefore could not compete in the international category despite being one of the year’s most celebrated films.

The practical marketing implications are obvious. The subtler implication — the one worth watching from inside the Palais — is whether the rule changes the jury’s deliberations themselves. If a film comes from a country unlikely to submit it officially, or from a filmmaker working in exile, the jury may have an additional reason to view the Palme as the mechanism by which that film reaches the largest possible audience.

Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” from an exiled Russian director working outside any national film infrastructure that would submit on his behalf, acquires particular weight under this framework. The Palme d’Or has always been the festival’s most powerful act of advocacy. This year, it is also an Oscar campaign.

The Park Chan-wook Question
Park’s appointment as the first Korean jury president in Cannes history is not an administrative gesture. It is a statement about what kind of cinema the festival is prepared to spotlight.

His filmography is built on aesthetic convictions that are, in the context of prestige festival cinema, somewhat unconventional. Park is not a director of restraint. He is a director of precision, which is different. His films — “Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden,” “Decision to Leave” — deploy genre mechanics as delivery vehicles for ideas that straight drama would render schematic. The transgression in his work is aestheticized without being endorsed, creating the vertiginous ethical discomfort that has become his signature.

For this year’s competition, that matters. The traditional Cannes tendency to reward austere minimalism over kinetic construction may be less pronounced under a jury president who has spent his career dissolving the boundary between art cinema and genre cinema. Na Hong-jin’s “Hope” is not the obvious Palme winner on paper. Under Park, it might be.

What is equally likely to matter is formal ambition and visual intelligence. Hamaguchi’s spatial precision, Pawlikowski’s rigorously argued black-and-white, Zvyagintsev’s monumental compositional control and Farhadi’s intricate ensemble construction all speak to a craft vocabulary Park is likely to value. A film that is emotionally sincere but technically uninteresting may have a harder time surviving these jury deliberations.

The most defensible Palme scenarios at the outset are Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” for formal control and Neon’s institutional weight; Na’s “Hope,” as a historic genre statement in the year of the first Korean jury president; Mungiu’s “Fjord,” for moral complexity and formal seriousness; and Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” for both biographical freight and the new Oscar eligibility framework. Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” is the disciplined dark horse. Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” is the sleeper that could dominate post-screening jury conversation. Almodóvar, who has never won despite numerous Cannes appearances, is likelier to receive a career acknowledgment than a competitive prize.

The Market, AI, and the Industry’s Open Questions
The Marché du Film, running May 12–20, remains the industry’s most reliable barometer of where the money thinks cinema is going. This year, it is measuring a business that has lost some old certainties and has not yet replaced them.

The mega-packaged movie has effectively disappeared from the Marché’s upper tier. The economics of independently financing big-budget films have become unforgiving, pushing producers and sales companies toward leaner concepts with clearer theatrical identities. The market’s flagship package is likely Park Chan-wook directing “The Brigands of Rattlecreek,” an English-language western starring Matthew McConaughey, Pedro Pascal and Austin Butler. It represents the new upper end: a revenge narrative with a clean commercial hook and a cast that provides immediate territorial recognition.

Below that level, the market is increasingly binary in a way that unnerves buyers. Audiences appear younger and more genre-oriented. “Longlegs,” “Materialists” and “Marty Supreme” are the reference points buyers are citing, not Merchant-Ivory. Elevated horror, star-driven erotic thrillers and prestige auteur plays with commercial hooks are moving fastest.

Neon’s footprint at the festival is itself a market story: nine films, including Hamaguchi, Na Hong-jin, James Gray and Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown,” starring Léa Seydoux. A single distributor holding that proportion of the competition is unusual and speaks to a consolidation of acquisition power that mirrors what is happening on the studio side.

The AI question runs through the Marché and the Palais like a rip current. The Marché is hosting the second edition of its AI for Talent Summit alongside the largest virtual production stage ever presented at a film market. The festival’s artistic leadership opened its lineup announcement with an explicit defense of human creativity. These two positions — innovation hub versus defender of human authorship — are being held simultaneously by connected institutions across the same 12 days. Whether they can coexist without friction is one of the more interesting internal tensions of this year’s edition.

The provocateur in the middle is Steven Soderbergh, whose “John Lennon: The Last Interview” uses AI imagery for roughly 10 percent of its runtime — a creative choice that, in any other year, might be discussed purely in aesthetic terms. In this year’s Cannes, with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA both in active contract renegotiations over AI guardrails ahead of their 30 June deadline, it is also a policy statement, whether Soderbergh intends it as one or not.

Frémaux acknowledged the broader context when addressing the Academy’s new AI rules: “Hollywood is undergoing a major shake-up. After COVID, the writers’ strike, which, incidentally, is linked to issues surrounding artificial intelligence, followed by restructuring, mergers, acquisitions, and so on.” Studio representatives appearing on Marché panels will be conscious of every word. Creative guild members will surely be less patient.

Beyond the Competition
Of the many sidebar selections offered up by Cannes, Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” opening Un Certain Regard, may be the film most likely to generate cultural noise beyond industry circles. Schoenbrun, whose “I Saw the TV Glow” was one of 2024’s most discussed films, has made a meta-horror about a filmmaker, played by Hannah Einbinder, hired to reboot a slasher franchise who becomes obsessed with persuading the original film’s final girl, portrayed by Gillian Anderson, to return. MUBI releases it in North America in August.

Also in Un Certain Regard, the most significant discovery story may be Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s debut feature — the first film by a Rwandan director ever to appear in Cannes’ Official Selection — recently acquired by mk2 Films after the team saw the completed work. The combination of debut authority, historical urgency and institutional backing is exactly the profile that produces breakout stories in this section.

Meanwhile, Directors’ Fortnight opens with Kantemir Balagov’s “Butterfly Jam,” his English-language debut, starring Barry Keoghan and Riley Keough and set in a New Jersey community of Circassian immigrants. Both of Balagov’s previous Cannes entries won major Un Certain Regard prizes. Fortnight artistic director Julien Rejl has described “Butterfly Jam” as bringing to mind the films of James Gray. The cast’s commercial profile is the most starry of any Fortnight opener in recent memory.

What the Festival Is Actually About
Cannes 2026 will be written about, in the days to come, as the festival Hollywood skipped. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

What this festival is actually about is whether cinema can still carry the weight the world asks it to carry. Whether images projected in a dark room, watched collectively, can do something that algorithms and streams and platforms cannot. Whether the belief that justified Cannes’ founding in 1939 — that bringing artists together across borders was not a luxury, but a necessity — still holds.

Pierre Salvadori, whose “Electric Kiss” starts the party tonight, put it as plainly as anyone has. The Cannes Film Festival, he told the New York Times, is “a celebration of auteur movies” that reflects “this special idea of what movies should be, of what cinema is about.”

The Palme d’Or will be awarded on 23 May. Between now and then, 22 films will make their arguments. A market will make its deals. A jury will deliberate. And somewhere on the Croisette, in the particular light that falls across the Palais in May, the industry will remind itself why it came here in the first place.

The films are always the point.

The post As Hollywood Pulls Back, Cannes Doubles Down appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

Over the past several months, we’ve been asked on numerous occasions when nominations would open for this year’s list. The good news is that nominations are now officially open.

Last year, we received a record number of nominations, which made selecting the final list more difficult than ever. As in recent years, we are again applying a set of simple criteria to help streamline the process, give nominators clearer guidance and ensure the selection committee has the information it needs to produce the strongest and most deserving list possible.

For those looking to nominate candidates — and we hope that’s everyone reading this — we ask that nominees meet the criteria below:

1. Candidates should have been working in the cinema exhibition industry for a minimum of two years.
2. Candidates should hold at least a management-level position.
3. Candidates should be able to demonstrate additional industry contributions, achievements, recognition or initiatives. These do not necessarily have to be directly related to exhibition, but they should be outlined in the submission form.

In order to be recognised on this year’s list, nominees should demonstrate how they have made a positive difference within their business beyond their daily work, as well as how they have contributed to the broader exhibition industry. Along with career highlights and background information, please be sure to include new and relevant accomplishments from the last 12–18 months.

These criteria will help the selection committee evaluate nominees. Ultimately, our goal is to make sure candidates are included because they are genuinely impressive — not simply because they are good at their job, which we would assume is a given.

If you’re unsure whether someone qualifies, or have any questions about the process, please get in touch with us at women@celluloidjunkie.com.

And finally, as we say every year — and cannot stress enough — we can’t compile the list without support from the industry. In other words: please get your nominations in. Submit them via this form.

If you’re interested in partnering with us on this project, please drop us a line at sponsorship@celluloidjunkie.com.

The deadline for submissions is 12 June 2026. We are currently scheduled to publish the list just prior to this year’s CineEurope, which takes place 22–25 June 2026 in Barcelona, Spain.

The post Nominations Open for CJ’s 2026 Top Women in Global Cinema List appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

That mood traveled onto the stage. Anyone listening for the tone underneath the trailers and showreels heard something other than a victory lap. The 2026 studio presentations were carefully constructed arguments for why theatrical still works, pitched — with no small amount of urgency — to the people who already believe.

After several years in which the studio-exhibitor relationship was conducted in passive-aggressive press releases and shrinking windows, the ritual of reassurance was back. CinemaCon has always been part trade show, part revival meeting. In 2026, the revival was working overtime.

Franchise Gravity
The most obvious pattern across the week — and the one most likely to be dismissed as boring — was franchise gravity.

Disney closed the convention with the first full trailer for “Avengers: Doomsday,” fronted by stars Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, alongside footage from “The Mandalorian and Grogu” and a pipeline of “Toy Story,” “Moana” and Marvel extensions, all wrapped in an Infinity Vision premium-format push. Warner Bros. brought along the seven-minute opener for “Dune: Part Three,” DC’s “Supergirl,” and Tom Cruise introducing his next film, “Digger” alongside its director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Universal leaned on Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” with Minions and Mario-era family business holding up the floor. Sony built its slate around “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” not to mention the conclusion of the animated “Spider-Verse” trilogy, “Jumanji: Open World” and an animated adaptation of video game “Bloodborne.” Paramount pitched “Top Gun 3,” “Call of Duty,” “Scary Movie 6” and “Angry Birds 3.” Amazon MGM uncorked “Spaceballs: The New One,” “Highlander” and “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

If that reads like a list of the same studios repeating themselves, that is roughly the point. Theatrical’s reset has not produced a flowering of original storytelling; it has produced a re-investment in known IP and predictability. Don’t get us wrong, original films were not absent — filmmakers Damien Chazelle and Teyana Taylor on the Paramount slate, the Sony Pictures Classics and StudioCanal portions of the week, Warner’s announced a new specialty label named Clockwork — but they were not driving the conversation. The studios have decided that the safest way to refill auditoriums in 2026 is to reduce uncertainty about what audiences are walking into in the first place.

The more useful framing is not original-versus-franchise. It is eventized originality versus brand exploitation. Universal sold Spielberg and Nolan inside a franchise-rich showcase. Warner argued for original storytelling while flexing DC, Dune and a Cruise-Iñárritu pairing. Amazon MGM literally framed its strategy as “beloved IP and bold, original ideas.” Even Disney’s dominance was acknowledged in the room alongside a quieter anxiety that the machine has become too optimized. Bland brand exploitation is increasingly exposed; brands that can borrow auteur legitimacy, or originals that can become brands, are where the strategy has moved.

Theatrical-First, Finally Aligned
Underneath the slates, the messaging was rigorously aligned in a way it has not been in years. “Only in theatres” was repeated so often it stopped sounding like a tag and started reading as doctrine.

Cinema United CEO Michael O’Leary used his State of the Industry speech to note that the average window for the top 100 films in 2025 had risen to 37 days, and would have hit 49 days had each of those titles been given a 45-day exclusive run. By the time the studio reels were over, exhibitors had heard:

• Universal commit to at least five weekends of theatrical play for every release.
• Paramount Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison promise a 45-day exclusive theatrical window “starting today,” with a 90-day path to streaming and a pledge of 30 theatrical films a year from a combined Paramount-Warner entity.
• Amazon MGM extend the theatrical window on “Project Hail Mary” and tout more than $670 million from its first four 2026 releases.
• Sony’s Tom Rothman openly agitate for longer windows.
• Disney holding to its 60-day standard, treating it as table stakes rather than concession.

The remarkable thing, given the last five years, was the lack of disagreement. There is now a working consensus inside the major-studio system: a roughly 45-day theatrical-exclusive corridor, with premium video on demand (PVOD) tolerated sooner than subscription-streaming availability. That is not a return to the pre-pandemic 90-day window, and it is not the windowing theology of 2019. But it is closer to a stable settlement than the industry has had at any point since the pandemic — and the studios mostly arrived in Las Vegas wanting credit for it.

The catch is the obvious one. Messaging is an act of repetition, and you only repeat what you have not yet established. The reason the 2026 presentations were so heavy on theatrical-first rhetoric is that exhibitors have spent the last five years being told otherwise. Reassurance, almost by definition, is what you offer when the underlying question is still open, and still not fully answered.

Spectacle Is the Load-Bearing Argument
The other recurring pitch was sensory. Disney’s Infinity Vision rollout — formalizing a Disney-blessed premium large-format certification and clearer PLF consumer branding — was the most explicit version of this strategy, but it was hardly alone. Every studio at one point or another found a way to invoke Dolby, IMAX, Imersa, ScreenX, 4DX, 4D E-Motion or simply “the biggest possible screen.” Runtimes are creeping back up. Visual scale was repeatedly cited, often by talent themselves, as the reason to leave the house.

This is not a branding flourish. If the post-streaming theatrical model is going to defend itself, the argument cannot be made on price or convenience. It has to be made on experience. That makes premium large-format auditoriums and their elevated ticket prices structurally important to studio strategy in a way they simply were not five years ago. PLF is no longer a top-of-the-funnel marketing accent. It is becoming the load-bearing wall of the higher-margin theatrical economy — and most of the slates shown in Vegas were, implicitly or otherwise, built to monetize on those screens first.

The Calendar Problem Beneath the Slates
The slates also told a different story when read across the year rather than studio by studio. Even the strongest presentations revealed an industry still working with a lopsided release graph: clusters of tentpoles bunched around the traditional corridors, gaps of weeks elsewhere, and not enough mid-budget filler to keep auditoriums consistently full between events. The industry has gotten better at creating moments. It has not yet solved what happens between them. Universal’s volume and discipline were the exception that proved the rule; several other majors are still essentially organizing their release year around three or four moments and hoping the rest takes care of itself.

Exhibitors did not need the gaps pointed out to them. Cinema United and its members have been pleading for steadier mid-budget product for years. None of the 2026 studio presentations resolved that problem. In some cases, by stacking franchise cargo on the obvious release dates, they sharpened it.

Who Controlled the Room, and Who Needed It
There were tiers to the week, and the tiers were legible if you watched the room.

Universal walked in confident and walked out the studio that, in many attendee conversations, “won” CinemaCon — less because of any single trailer than because its package felt the most balanced and the least performative. It probably didn’t hurt to have both Nolan and Spielberg on stage to present an extended look at their upcoming films. Disney looked dominant, almost reflexively so; the conference treated it like a force of nature even as some attendees worried about creative conservatism creeping in around the edges of a studio that accounted for more than 27.5% of the 2025 domestic box office. Sony was unusually combative. Rothman told a roomful of theatre owners to “get off the ad crack,” shorten pre-shows and make moviegoing cheaper — language no exhibitor enjoyed hearing but few could dispute, at least publicly anyway.

Below them sat the studios that needed the room more than the room needed them. Warner Bros. showed up starrier than almost anyone — Cruise, Iñárritu, Villeneuve — but it arrived under the cloud of the proposed Paramount Skydance / Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and its presentation read in part as a reminder that the current creative leadership is still capable of cultural force whatever shareholders eventually decide. Paramount, anchored by Ellison’s commitments, was effectively running for political office. Amazon MGM was making the case that last year’s theatrical rhetoric was not a branding exercise, helped considerably by the 2026 outperformance of “Project Hail Mary” but still hedging on its more adult, director-driven titles.

But the asymmetry of need was unmistakable. The studios with momentum used the stage to consolidate authority. The studios without it used the stage to bargain.

The Showreel Economy
If there is a single artifact that explains why CinemaCon still matters in an era of permanent trailer drops, it is the sizzle reel. Most of the footage shown to exhibitors will never be released publicly in the form the room saw it. That is part of the argument.

A four-minute, thunderously cut, music-driven montage of a studio’s upcoming year — designed for a 4,000-seat auditorium with calibrated sound and a sympathetic crowd — is one of the most efficient persuasion tools the modern entertainment business has. It is emotional manipulation in the best sense: a controlled environment that turns belief in theatrical into something that can be felt rather than argued. The room is the message.

The studios know this. So do the exhibitors. So do the trade reporters who file dispatches that, more often than not, bend toward the rooms in which they sat. (Don’t get us started on the influx of influencers that showed up at this year’s event.) In a business built on anticipation, the showreel remains one of the industry’s most effective currencies — and CinemaCon is, more than any other convention in this business, the place where that currency is minted.

Confidence as Strategy, Not Solution
None of this means the studio presentations resolved the industry’s structural problems. The release calendar is still uneven. Mid-budget originals are still under-supported. Consolidation anxiety is still palpable, with O’Leary using the same convention to publicly oppose the Paramount/Warner transaction even as Ellison was promising more theatrical movies, longer windows and faster decisions. The 45-day window is a settlement, not a solution. And the deeper question — whether theatrical can sustain itself as a culturally indispensable channel rather than a premium niche — remains unresolved.

But CinemaCon 2026’s studio presentations did make a quietly significant case. They argued, more carefully than they did even a year ago, that at its best theatrical still has no equal — and that, for now, the studios believe that argument enough to make it again, on a stage in Las Vegas, in front of the people whose business depends on it being true.

If the State of the Industry address framed a business negotiating its future, the studio presentations showed how that future is being sold.

The post CinemaCon 2026: The Studios Make Their Case for Theatrical appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

But this year, any talk of industry unity came with an asterisk.

The proposed Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery merger has divided the industry that gathered in Las Vegas in ways that make any messaging of solidarity look fragile. The Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted to approve the merger 23 April. Whatever happens next, CinemaCon made clear that unity, while still invoked, is no longer assumed.

The Official Narrative
On the Colosseum stage, the message was one of continuity and confidence.

Motion Picture Association (MPA) Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin centered his remarks on a theme of trust; with a 91% public approval rating for the MPA’s ratings system as his evidence that the industry has built something durable. The framing was partly self-congratulatory but served a pointed purpose: differentiating the theatrical experience from the social media platforms under sustained regulatory scrutiny over children’s safety. When Instagram attempted to appropriate the MPA’s PG-13 designation for teen accounts, the MPA pushed back and won. “Let there be no doubt,” Rivkin said. “On my watch, no one will confuse movies shown in your theaters with user-generated content people watch on their phones.”

It was less a defense of theatrical than a line being drawn around what the industry still considers itself to be.

On copyright and artificial intelligence, Rivkin staked out the MPA’s consistent position: copyright protection and technological innovation are “twin pillars,” not competing priorities. The core copyright industries contribute more than USD $2 trillion to the gross domestic product of the United States and supports 11.6 million workers, he noted, and AI should be “a tool that can enhance human creativity, not replace it.” The MPA’s successful pushback against ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 — a text-to-video platform that launched using copyrighted studio characters — was cited as a recent proof of concept: swift action produced guardrails.

His primary legislative objective remains a federal film tax incentive, a campaign he flagged at CinemaCon 2025 and reported progress on this year. If enacted, it would represent a structural shift in how the U.S. competes with Canada, the United Kingdom, and other jurisdictions that have long used production incentives to attract Hollywood shoots.

What Rivkin did not address was the defining corporate story hanging over the week. As head of an organization representing both Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, Rivkin avoided the merger entirely.

At CinemaCon, silence can be strategic.

Optimism, Genuine and Qualified
Cinema United President and CEO Michael O’Leary struck a similar tone of cautious optimism, but with a more grounded focus on the realities facing exhibition.

He opened with a personal anecdote — —recalling celebrating America’s bicentennial at age eight and his grandfather’s prediction that he might live to see the country’s 250th anniversary. “Good news,” O’Leary said, “I made it, and so did America.”

The point was not nostalgia, but resilience. The theatrical business, like the country it has accompanied for more than half its existence, endures through reinvention rather than inertia.

The numbers were genuinely encouraging. Gen Z is now the industry’s fastest-growing habitual moviegoing segment: frequency among 12-to-28-year-olds increased 25% in a single year, and a recent study identified moviegoing as the top leisure activity among young people. Five of the top ten domestic box office performers in 2025 were rated PG. Original films performed strongly. The first quarter of 2026 has sustained the momentum, with Amazon MGM’s “Project Hail Mary,” Disney’s “Hoppers,” and Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” all delivering for movie theatres.

What this suggests is not just recovery, but the return of habit — something the industry has spent the last five years trying to rebuild.

The newly formed Cinema United Filmmaker Leadership Council — led by Jerry Bruckheimer and Emma Thomas, with Brad Bird, Ryan Coogler, Jason Reitman, and Celine Song rounding out the charter membership — was a highlight of O’Leary’s pitch for a broader coalition. Reitman, who owns the Westwood Village Theatre in Los Angeles, appeared at the Independent Theatre Owners Coalition (ITOC) meeting in Las Vegas over the weekend.

But the optimism was qualified.

O’Leary quickly pivoted to the two issues that continue to define exhibition’s outlook: consolidation and windows.

The Window Debate Continues
Release windows remain unfinished business.

The average theatrical window for wide releases in 2025 was 37 days; a three-day increase over 2024, which qualifies as progress only relative to how far the baseline has fallen. Cinema United’s modeling suggests that a universal 45-day floor would have pushed that average to 49 days, a full two weeks longer.

Disney’s 62-day average window in 2025 — and its position as the only studio to generate a billion-dollar film that year, leading the domestic box office for the 12th time in 15 years — makes the correlation increasingly difficult to ignore. Universal’s announcement of a 45-day minimum across all its wide releases effective January 1st drew genuine praise from O’Leary.

And with at least two studios publicly backing a 45-day window, the pressure on holdouts is building. Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman has become an increasingly vocal advocate for restoring meaningful windows, having argued on the Colosseum stage during his studio’s Monday evening presentation (and in the New York Times) for a longer exclusive theatrical window.

What remains unresolved is the post-theatrical window. O’Leary said at Cinema United’s press breakfast that the organization would prefer 90 to 120 days before a film reaches a subscription service. Current practice falls well short.

A Consolidation Causes A Fracture
Meanwhile, the debate over the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger brought industry tensions into sharper focus. Even within Cinema United itself.

On one side: O’Leary, who used his State of the Industry address to warn that “further concentrating marketplace power in the hands of a smaller group of distributors that dictate the terms, windows, scheduling, screen-placement of movies, and access to historic film catalogs will have a real and lasting impact on Main Street and millions of movie fans around the world.”

On the other: AMC Theatres Chairman and CEO Adam Aron, who publicly backed the deal later in the week.

That two of the industry’s most prominent voices arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions about the same transaction captures the difficulty of the moment.

Cinema United’s name suggests a consolidated front. The reality, at least on this issue, is more complicated.

The Merger: Hollywood Takes Sides
If the proposed takeover of its parent company went completely unmentioned during Warner Bros. Pictures’ studio slot on Tuesday evening, the tension in the Colosseum came to a head during Paramount’s presentation on Thursday.

Paramount Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison stepped on stage to make his appeal directly.

“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” he told the assembled theater operators. He committed to a minimum of 30 films per year from the combined entity, a 45-day exclusive theatrical window, and a 90-day period before films move to any streaming service. “People can speculate all they want, but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment.”

On paper, it is the kind of framework exhibitors have been asking for. In practice, it is a promise attached to a transaction they do not control.

The commitments drew applause. They are also, on their face, more than exhibition has extracted from either studio independently. Paramount released eight films in 2025 and is planning 15 this year; the pledge of 30 per year is a significant escalation, especially with what many believe will be a leaner studio after potential layoffs.

Aron’s endorsement leaned into exactly that logic. “I am confident that David Ellison is sincere as to his intentions, and truly believe that he in fact will wind up delivering on these commitments,” he said in a statement issued Thursday.

Cinema United was not convinced. In a formal statement issued hours after Ellison’s speech, the organization said: “While recent pledges attempt to address the threats of consolidation to our industry, they are not yet sufficient in addressing our concerns. We remain open to tangible commitments that will ensure a vibrant global theatrical exhibition industry for years to come.”

One way to read that is: put it in writing, Mr. Ellison. Preferably in a contract.

History Is Rhyming, If Not Repeating
The structural argument against the deal draws on history.

The Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019 and Discovery’s takeover of WarnerMedia both resulted in widespread layoffs and production cutbacks. The latter saddled Warner Bros. Discovery with USD $43 billion in debt on day one, prompting deep cost cuts throughout the organization. The proposed Paramount merger would produce a combined debt load of USD $79 billion; a figure cited prominently by critics of the deal.

That concern has extended well beyond exhibition. An open letter opposing the transaction — organized with support from Jane Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment and signed by nearly 1,000 artists at publication, with the number growing past 4,000 — included Denis Villeneuve, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Thompson, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Ben Stiller, and Bryan Cranston among its signatories. “This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries — and the audiences we serve — can least afford it,” the letter read.

At Cinema United’s press breakfast, O’Leary offered a blunt assessment of what consolidation could mean in practice: it would take eight high-performing independent films to replace the revenue of a single average Warner Bros. release.

“I don’t want to create the impression that we’re just going to fill the gap,” he said.

On the question of inevitability, O’Leary was more direct. “Things are inevitable until they’re not,” he said. For now, he added the strategy is simple: “We’re going to play until the whistle or until my board tells me to stop.”

Netflix, Still in the Room — Though Not in Theatres
That informal breakfast conversation was perhaps the most candid of the week.

On Sunday, before CinemaCon officially began, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos had been seen exiting Caesars Palace, after meeting with exhibition leaders on Cinema United’s board. Asked about it, O’Leary explained that the meeting had originally been arranged while Netflix was still in the running to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. When Netflix withdrew from that bidding war, O’Leary expected it to be called off. It wasn’t.

“And so we came, had a candid conversation. In fairness, all of my conversations with them have been candid,” said O’Leary of Netflix. No commitments were made on either side during the discussion.

“I don’t want the message when we walk out of here [to be] that Netflix is coming to theaters,” he said. “I just think it was a good chance to get everybody in the same room together, develop and understand each other, and say, ‘Look, if there’s a path forward in the future, we should explore it.'”

When pressed on whether Netflix could one day present at CinemaCon, O’Leary did not close the door. “That door’s open to anybody who wants to be in theatrical in a meaningful way,” he said. “So if you’re asking me in two years if they were doing a Netflix presentation because there’s half a dozen movies going into theaters, with fully supported marketing and windows, yeah, absolutely, we’ll find time.”

That is not a negotiated position. It is, however, a signal: the conversation is now happening at the highest level.

The Terms of Coexistence
What CinemaCon 2026 made plain is that theatrical exhibition is no longer fighting for survival. It is now negotiating its terms of coexistence — with streaming platforms, with consolidating studios, with the economics of a supply chain that remains unsettled.

The question of who controls the content, and on what terms, is the one the industry came to Las Vegas unable to answer — and left still unresolved.

The post CinemaCon 2026: A Merger Splits the House appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

For years, Nollywood has been one of the most productive film industries in the world, but productivity has never translated neatly into power. The industry has lived in a strange in-between; globally visible, culturally influential, but structurally underbuilt. Filmhouse Group is betting that the problem was never the story but the system. Chief Marketing Officer Mojisola Oladapo told Celluloid Junkie, “We are shaping how audiences perceive and engage with African stories. I say this because there used to be a time when Nollywood was perceived as substandard because of the quality of their film. You can tell it’s no longer the same.”

At a time when global audiences are increasingly hungry for diverse stories, Nigeria’s film industry — Nollywood — stands at a critical inflection point. Prolific yet often structurally constrained, the industry is now being transformed by companies that recognise storytelling alone is not enough. Among the most strategic of these is Filmhouse Group. They’re not just quietly making eligible films; they’re building a functional system that inspires growth and relevance in practical terms. “For us it goes beyond the stories,” said Oladapo. “We are the bridge.”

Strategic Thinking
What distinguishes Filmhouse is not simply its scale, but its philosophy: Nollywood’s global relevance cannot be achieved through content alone, but through infrastructure, partnerships, and systems that mirror and eventually rival those of Hollywood. Filmhouse is not just striving to build a film company but a strong ecosystem with compelling global relevance.

Filmhouse Group operates through a vertically integrated model that spans cinema exhibition (Filmhouse Cinemas), distribution (FilmOne Entertainment), and production (FilmOne Studios). This structure allows the company to control the entire value chain from how films are made, to how they are marketed, to where and how they are shown. This is significant because one of Nollywood’s historical weaknesses has been fragmentation. Films were often produced independently, distributed informally, and exhibited inconsistently. Filmhouse’s model has replaced that fragmentation with a coordinated structure that is currently reshaping Nollywood’s presence.

“The balance is deliberate as a business,” Filmhouse CEO Kene Okwuosa said. “Hollywood titles remain important for driving consistent footfall and sustaining cinema-going habits, while Nollywood continues to perform strongly across our cinema locations through premieres, talent, and storytelling.”

Under the leadership of Okwuosa, the company has grown into a dominant force, accounting for a substantial share of cinema ticket sales in Nigeria and distributing many of the country’s highest-grossing films: “A Tribe Called Judah” was the first Nollywood film to gross more than NGN ₦1 billion (USD $743,235), eventually reaching NGN ₦1.408 billion (USD $1.04 million), and “Behind the Scenes” took NGN ₦2.76 billion (USD $2.04 million). But scale alone is not the goal, standardisation is. Filmhouse’s leadership has been explicit about a key idea: global success requires global-standard infrastructure. This is why the company has invested heavily in cinema technology and boosting the moviegoing experience, introducing IMAX and other advanced formats into Nigeria, and expanding modern multiplexes beyond traditional elite urban zones.

Adding Value
In a shifting economy with uncertainties (inflation hitting operating costs, piracy, competition from streamers), Filmhouse is maximising data, partnerships and collaborations to drive efficiency and expansion, with an eye on increasing Nollywood’s relevance and standing. These moves are not just about local market growth; they are about perception. The reception of a film by audiences, investors, and international partners is immediately elevated when it is presented in a world-class environment.

As Okwuosa puts it, the global appetite for African stories already exists. The challenge is building the systems to sustain and scale that demand: from licensing frameworks to exhibition standards to distribution pipelines. 

In other words, Filmhouse is reframing Nollywood from a volume industry to a value industry through a strategic ecosystem that maximises collaborations and partnerships. Through FilmOne Entertainment, the company holds theatrical distribution relationships with major Hollywood studios such as Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Angel, Empire, MGM, and Sun Africa Group. This is doing two things simultaneously. Firstly, it positions Filmhouse as a gateway for international content into West Africa. In turn, it creates reciprocal pathways for Nollywood films to access global distribution networks. This dual positioning is critical. Rather than isolating Nollywood as a regional industry, Filmhouse aims to embed it within the global film economy where collaboration, co-production, and cross-market distribution are the norm. 

In addition, their presence at major international events like the Cannes Film Festival and the recently concluded CinemaCon further reinforces this ambition. By participating in global industry conversations, showcasing projects, and forming partnerships, Filmhouse is actively inserting Nollywood into the circuits where cinema is defined.

CEO Okwuosa, explained what Filmhouse’s international strategy looks like in practical terms. “As a business across exhibition, distribution, and production, Filmhouse Group’s international strategy is focused on scale and long-term positioning,” he said. “This includes strengthening studio relationships, maintaining a presence in key international markets, and building exhibition, distribution, and production infrastructure that aligns with global standards, while positioning African content for wider reach.”

Historically, Nollywood’s strength has been its cultural specificity, with stories deeply rooted in Nigerian and African realities. Filmhouse understands this dynamic, and is refining it and positioning it for global relevance. Filmhouse’s CMO Oladapo detailed how the company is balancing local content with Hollywood titles, calling it “a beautiful time to be alive and in the business. A decade ago, this wouldn’t be a conversation, Nollywood versus Hollywood in the same conversation. The power of storytelling excellence is what Nollywood is investing in. Stepping up, and proper execution is the reason we can have this conversation.”

Oladapo stated that Filmhouse’s core focus on distribution has been around portfolio optimisation. “Sometimes, particularly in the peak period like December, the past December was exceptional [for varied, complementary releases],” she said. “We had both ‘Avatar,’ with a wide audience, and ‘Behind the Scenes,’ a Nollywood new release, and both performed excellently. Hollywood tends to perform in specific periods like holidays, summer, etc. For Nollywood, we take advantage of specific windows and events. We achieve balance through dynamic scheduling for Hollywood, and for Nollywood, we eventify everything from targeted release timing to meet and greet events that pull audiences.”

Oladapo points to tech advantages that Filmhouse uses to retain an edge in the market. “We are diverse,” she said. “We have technologies that our competitors don’t have at the moment, so we tend to leverage that. The beauty of being the market leader is that your thoughts and ideas happen in real time. ‘Behind the Scenes’ did not just screen in Nigeria, it was distributed across audiences in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada. We window Nollywood titles beyond Nigeria leveraging on the diaspora demand. Sometimes, you don’t want to go with a strategy you are not sure will work in that market. You want to go where the talent has a presence. In the meantime, we are less focussed on building cinemas abroad immediately but more focused on exporting the demand first”.

Filmhouse Projects A Bigger Picture
In particular, Filmhouse’s approach suggests a deliberate counterbalance. By strengthening theatrical distribution, building local infrastructure, and forming international partnerships on its own terms, the company ensures that Nollywood is not merely exported but controlled. When asked about the insights gained from distributing global films locally and how that informs Nollywood internationally, CEO Okwuosa said,  “At FilmOne Entertainment, distributing global films locally has reinforced the importance of strong release strategy, audience understanding, marketing execution, and technical presentation. These are the core drivers of box office performance. We apply the same principles to Nollywood to ensure films are properly positioned and structured to perform across different theatrical markets, including beyond Nigeria.”

One key theme stands out in conversations with Filmhouse leadership: attention to detail. They have taken time to understand their audience and position themselves properly in the market. After grasping their audience, they have continued to build an ecosystem with global relevance, pushing Nollywood forward in the right direction.

Okwuosa went on to describe Filmhouse’s role in connecting African cinema to wider theatrical audiences as an ecosystem builder and connector. “Locally, it provides the infrastructure and platforms that allow African stories to thrive in cinemas,” he said. “Internationally, it engages global partners and industry platforms to position African films as commercially viable theatrical content for broader audiences.”

Filmhouse’s strategy is not just about solving structural challenges; it is about extending global expansion. What distinguishes Filmhouse Group particularly is that it is not just participating in Nollywood’s evolution; it is actively designing it. Its strategy can be summarised in three layers:

1. Dominate locally through exhibition and distribution
2. Standardise production and infrastructure to meet global expectations
3. Integrate globally through partnerships, festivals, and cross-border distribution

Speaking to CJ ahead of a visit to CinemaCon 2026, Okwuosa gave a glimpse of what he expected from the industry’s biggest convention of the year. “I have been going to CinemaCon for over 10 years, and it really reflects the scale of the industry,” he stated. “In 2026, it will be an important indicator of where things are heading, particularly around studio commitment to theatrical exclusivity, how release windows are evolving, focus on emerging markets, improvements in cinema technology and premium formats, and how exhibitors and distributors are working more closely together. It will also give a clearer sense of the major Hollywood titles to look out for across the year, and the overall strength of the studio slates.”

Stepping back to view the ambitious bigger picture, Filmhouse is not just a focus-driven, innovative company, but could also become a bridge between Nollywood and the world. While there has been visible progress, a question remains: can this group successfully build a premium film culture in a country where piracy remains a significant threat to revenue? Filmhouse is strongly betting that, over time, the answer will be yes. And if they’re proven right, it could be not only Nigeria but the world that reaps the benefits.

The post How Filmhouse is Positioning Nollywood, and Its Own Business, within the Global Cinema Landscape appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

But navigating the industry landscape, not to mention the trade show floor, isn’t always straightforward.

With hundreds of manufacturers and service providers showcasing everything from projection systems and seating to concessions and software platforms, it can be difficult to separate what’s incremental from what’s actually meaningful for operators.

The Celluloid Junkie CinemaCon Product Preview 2026 is designed to cut through that noise.

A Curated Look at What Matters
In the lead-up to this year’s show, we reached out across the industry to identify the products and solutions exhibitors are bringing to Las Vegas. The result is a curated preview of the technologies shaping how cinemas operate, engage audiences, and evolve their business models.

Rather than presenting this as a single list, we’ve organized the preview into a series of focused categories—reflecting the different layers of the modern cinema business, from ticketing and concessions to presentation technology and in-theatre experience.

How the Preview Is Structured
Over the coming days, we’ll be publishing a series of category-based posts, each highlighting a different part of the cinema ecosystem:

• Ticketing & Point of Sale Systems
• Concessions, Food & Beverage
• Business, Marketing & Operational Platforms
• Projection, Sound & Presentation Technology
• Seating & Auditorium Design
• Attractions, Arcade & Alternative Revenue

Each article focuses on what’s new, how these products work, and why they matter for exhibitors today.

What It Says About the Industry
Taken together, this year’s submissions point to several broader trends shaping the cinema business:

• Greater system integration across ticketing, marketing, and operations
• Increased focus on premium experiences, both inside and outside the auditorium
• Operational efficiency and automation as key priorities
• New approaches to driving revenue, from concessions to attractions

These themes reflect an industry that continues to adapt, not just to changing audience expectations, but to the realities of running a more complex and diversified business.

The post CinemaCon 2026 Product Preview: What’s Shaping the Cinema Business appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.