There’s a tentpole-sized hole in the center of this year’s Cannes lineup. For the first time since 2017, not a single film from a major Hollywood studio will be premiering at the festival.
There will be a couple of U.S. movies — Ira Sachs’ musical fantasy The Man I Love, with Rami Malek, and James Gray’s Paper Tiger, with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller, are in competition — but those are indies. Neon is releasing Paper Tiger stateside, and The Man I Love is still looking for domestic distribution.
What’s missing this year is the big-ticket blockbuster, a film like Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick, or Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Warner Bros.’ Elvis, or Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, previous studio films that used a Cannes premiere as a launchpad for their global rollout.
“The U.S. will be present [at this year’s festival], the studios less [so],” said Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, announcing the lineup April 8. He ended on a defiant (and defensive) note: “When the studios are less present in Cannes, they are less present, full stop.”
Cannes has tried to paper over the studio gap this year with a Midnight Screening of The Fast and the Furious, the original race car actioner that kicked off Universal’s unstoppable franchise back in 2001. Fast stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, along with producer Neal H. Moritz and Meadow Walker, daughter of the late Paul Walker, will attend the Wednesday night screening. Elsewhere, there is a Pan’s Labyrinth anniversary screening that will bring beloved director Guillermo Del Toro to the fest.
Cannes’ sales pitch to the studios is simple: We’ll give you a combination of artistic credibility, media buzz and the world’s most glamorous red carpet. And, because the world’s film journalists are here, a Cannes premiere can double as a movie’s international junket. But the costs are substantial. For a major release, paying for travel, accommodations and security for A-list talent in this pricey Mediterranean resort town can run into seven figures. At a time when the U.S. entertainment industry is still in a period of contraction, with yet another major merger still on the horizon, Cannes is an easily expendable line item.
“It’s horribly expensive, and if you screen to thousands of journalists and the film doesn’t play well, then you have got off to the worst start possible and it probably would have been better to just junket out of a major European city and embargo reviews for the week of opening,” says one veteran publicist who has handled studio films at past Cannes.
Insiders point to the 2023 Cannes debut of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny as a prime example of what can go wrong when a big studio film bows on the Croisette. That film, the first Indiana Jones movie to hit the big screen in 15 years, had its world premiere at Cannes, where it was greeted by less-than-stellar reviews from the international press. A few years on, going to Cannes and the middling reaction that followed is seen as a misstep in that film’s marketing plan. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny topped out at the global box office with only $384 million against a $295 million pre-marketing production budget.
It isn’t just Cannes. Studios are increasingly spooked by the idea of a big festival premiere, where fickle critics, and not the in-house marketing team, provide the first impressions of a film, often months before it hits theaters. “There’s a nervousness about reviews coming out long before release and about controlling the way films of that scale are launched because there’s so much at stake,” Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle told THR ahead of this year’s studio-free Berlin fest. Tuttle traces the trend back to the 2024 Venice festival launch of Joker: Folie à Deux — Todd Phillips’ follow-up to Joker — which was swiftly trashed by festival critics and declared dead on arrival, limping its way to a meager $200 million worldwide against a reported overall budget of $300 million.
“The quickness of response in the social media age has changed things,” says Toronto Film Festival director Cameron Bailey, noting that bad reviews out of the big festivals quickly go viral. He argues the appeal of a public festival like Toronto, compared to an industry event like Cannes, is its real-world audience: “When a major Hollywood studio or streamer brings a film to Toronto, it’s because they’re confident the film will resonate with the audience here, first of all.” Case in point: Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet,from Focus, whose awards campaign got a big boost after winning Toronto’s audience award and proving itself an early favorite among the industry at the Telluride Film Festival.
For big studio releases, a Cannes premiere is beneficial only if the film is set to hit theaters a week or two later. This was the case for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, which had a Cannes premiere May 18 before being released worldwide nine days later, on May 27. But, by this time, Maverick had already screened to rave reviews from the industry (it held a surprise screening for theater owners at CinemaCon that April) and the press (its world premiere was in San Diego in early May). If anything, the Cannes event, which included a fly-by from the French Air Force, was a victory lap for the film, which had already collected a month’s worth of goodwill and rave reviews.
Looking at this year’s release calendar, very few studio films fall close enough to Cannes to make a festival debut advantageous within a larger publicity tour. Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day comes out weeks after Cannes’ close, on June 12. Other Cannes-worthy tentpoles are even later. Disney’s hotly anticipated Toy Story 5 comes out June 17; Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, from Universal, hits theaters July 17 (Nolan, in any case, prefers to bypass festivals); and Warners’ Digger, from Alejandro G. Iñárritu and starring Tom Cruise, comes out Oct. 1.
A24, the indie studio with major-studio ambitions, also appears to have gotten the memo. This is the first Cannes since the 2020 edition canceled by the pandemic that does not feature any films from the company, long a Croisette regular. Last year, A24 brought several movies to Cannes, most notably Ari Aster’s starry competition entry Eddington, toplined by Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, which met with a muted reception and went on to underperform at the box office despite warmer reviews in the intervening months. By contrast, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme bypassed the A-list festivals altogether, opting for a lower-pressure New York Film Festival launch and a tightly controlled rollout, with strong critical support and a social media campaign driven by star Timothée Chalamet helping to turn the film into one of A24’s biggest hits, with box office topping $190 million worldwide.
Even without the promise of a box office boost, Cannes traditionally has been able to trade off its reputation as an awards predictor. For international and indie films, this is still the case. The triumphant 2025 competition premieres of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident catapulted the films all the way to the Oscars. But awards success of films like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (four Oscars) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (six, including best picture), both of which ignored the festival circuit to go straight to theaters, has taught the studios a different lesson. As one European marketing exec notes, “If you have the right film, you can make it soar without a festival.”
As the majors retreat to safer, more controlled launches, the Cannes festival’s center of gravity is shifting back to its roots — as a showcase for auteurs, risk-takers and the global indie sector that built its reputation long before Hollywood came calling.
“At the moment, it feels like the studio system and their theatrical approach are out of sync with the festivals,” says Mike Downey, an exec producer on the 2026 competition titles Parallel Tales from Asghar Farhadi and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden. “But if Cannes is moving away from Hollywood a bit, it puts the spotlight back on world cinema — and for that side of the business, that’s a good thing.”
David Canfield and Lily Ford contributed to this report.