L’Entree
We inadvertently missed last week’s drop, but since it’s officially summer, we decided to take a well-deserved vacation and completely tune out all the deadlines and deliverables piling up back at the office (or “guest bedroom,” as it’s commonly referred to).
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This faux pas, however, served as the inspiration: spending the summer somewhere on a beach, getting wine drunk by noon while smoking too many cigarettes, and completely ignoring anything even remotely related to ‘work’ is what they call “summer” in France (actually, they call it etė, because, well, they don’t speak English).
That – and that obscure little indie film festival which wrapped last week in the Antibes) – is why we decided to theme this week’s drop around the French, and the vivre au jor de jour in the media and entertainment industries.
So, get out your Galloises, whip out those Coq du Vins, and enjoy our weekly rundown of the top entertainment and media stories from this week and their career implications for professionals in our industry – and beyond.
If you’re wondering why there’s a lede to a lede, well, you know the one thing the French hate worse than office work or fast food is linear narratives or disposable content. Except, apparently, for the collective works of Jerry Lewis.
Et c’est ici que notre histoire commence:
Premiere Acte
The Cannes Film Festival is the entertainment industry’s annual exercise in performative reverence, a two-week mash-up of red carpet posturing, market gossip, and impossibly chic French strangers smoking on yachts while pretending not to read Variety on their iPhones.
It’s where the industry shows up to congratulate itself for caring about cinema, mostly so it doesn’t have to think about the quarterly earnings reports waiting back home.
For decades, Cannes has been less of a festival and more of an industry think tank with better catering. It’s where indie distributors gamble their entire P&L on a single bidding war, where international sales agents work harder in 12 days than studio execs do in 12 months, and where a 90-minute Romanian art film about a sad accountant can become a hot property if the right people clap for the right amount of time at the right after-party.
But this year felt different, somehow off, like maybe Cannes itself was operating on dial-up while the rest of the industry had moved to fiber.
The 79th edition of the festival concluded last weekend with the Palme d’Or going to a Norwegian melodrama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan (which sounds about right for a festival increasingly defined by what wasn’t there, rather than what was).
For starters, most of the studios decided to ghost the whole thing.
Disney didn’t show. Warner Bros. didn’t show. Paramount, Sony, and Universal also bailed. Amazon sponsored. C’est la vie.
Similarly, Christopher Nolan kept The Odyssey under wraps; Spielberg held back his upcoming, highly anticipated Disclosure Day release (dude makes a killer alien movie, fwiw).
At the end of the jour, there wasn’t a single, solitary studio movie at the end of the famous Cannes red carpet, which is sort of like throwing the Met Gala and forgetting to invite Anna Wintour, or like throwing the Razzies without including at least one Nick Cage performance.
That’s not to say there weren’t big red carpet moments at the festival. The biggest was, easily, a 25-year anniversary screening of The Fast and the Furious, the actual original one, the one Rob Cohen directed when Dubya was still in his first term, and Vin Diesel was still calling himself an “indie filmmaker.”
Yeah, I shit you not.
Even Mr. Diesel got a little misty at the Palais – likely because he’s now like $8/gallon in LA. It was a sweet moment, sure, but also a damning one for a festival that had to dust off a Bush administration street racing flick to manufacture a Hollywood moment. See you again, indeed.
Meanwhile, the actual energy at the festival came from indies, foreigners, and queer auteurs working on shoestring budgets with cast lists no AMPTP signatory would touch.
The festival’s hottest titles weren’t sequels or reboots, but original films from filmmakers most American audiences couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
Depending on your view of the industry, that’s either a sign of cinema’s enduring vitality or a warning that the entire ecosystem is starting to come apart at the seams (plot twist: it’s a bit of both, if we’re being honest).
The thing about Cannes is that it’s always been something of a leading indicator; whatever’s bubbling up on the Croisette in May tends to crystallize into industry consensus by September, with the trades and the trade groups all dutifully picking up the storyline.
For example, back in 2017, Cannes foreshadowed that whole Netflix vs. exhibitior cold war that’s still simmering today. The 2023 edition, similarly, foreshadowed widespread labor actions and guild strikes.
Last year’s festival foreshadowed the streamer pullback that’s now in full swing. If that pattern holds, Cannes 2026 is throwing us a few kind of dismal omens about what’s next and where the industry’s heading. It’s both a sorrow, and a pity (and keeping with the French theme, one could even call it galling – tip your waiters).
Thing is, it looks like the studios are pulling back from cinema as a distinct art form; a film is no longer an auteur-driven narrative, but simply content to feed the relentless release windows that come with so many content commitments across so many platforms.
The indies, conversely, seem to be evolving in ways that don’t necessarily favor traditional distributors. AI is no longer the boogeyman lurking outside the studio gates, but the official sponsor of the lounge where everyone’s debating what to do about it. Yeah, it’s super awkward (shout out to Salesforce for its multiple contributions to the art of film).
Meanwhile, a coordinated political fight over media consolidation is breaking out in France, with obvious parallels to what’s happening here, even if most American outlets aren’t covering it that way. Although, like all fights involving the French, a surrender is probably imminent.
Here’s what happened at Cannes this year, and what each of these storylines means for your career.
1. The Wages of Fear: Hollywood Stays Home
There’s something almost touching about how the major studios used to treat Cannes like an obligation. Even when the movies were mid, even when the box office bump was negligible, they’d still send the stars, charter the yacht and pretend the Croisette was the center of the universe for two weeks every May.
This year, they just kinda didn’t bother.
No Disney. No Warner Bros. No Paramount. No tentpole premieres, no after parties at the Hotel du Cap, no awkward photo calls where a studio chief tries to look enthusiastic about an art film he hasn’t actually seen.
The biggest Hollywood moment of the festival was a 25 year reunion screening of The Fast and the Furious, which reportedly brought Vin Diesel to tears and also brought everyone else to the uncomfortable realization that the festival’s biggest draw this year was a film older than most of the assistants running their bosses’ coffee.
The reasons are pretty rational, honestly. Cannes is expensive, the European press can be merciless, and Warner Bros. demonstrated last year with One Battle After Another and Sinners that you can win Oscars without ever booking a flight to Nice.
Throw in the fact that streaming has more or less obliterated the concept of a “festival bump” for theatrical releases, and the math just stops working. Why spend a couple million on a Cannes premiere when you can launch the same title with a 6 second teaser on TikTok and skip the customs forms?
Read more:Hollywood Ghosts the Croisette (The Hollywood Reporter)
Why This Matters for Your Career
The studios skipping Cannes this year isn’t really about the Cannes festival. Rather, it’s really about the slow, ongoing decoupling of the major studios from the broader film ecosystem. For decades, the industry operated on a sort of shared infrastructure model, where the Big 5 (now Big 4, give or take a Paramount) provided the gravitational pull that everyone. from indie distributors to awards consultants to international sales agents, organized around
This cottage industry was always in the studio orbit, but existed in something of a parallel universe, sort of like the TedX events are kinda like TED, for those who don’t have the brand cache, publicity machine or activation budget to make the real TED happen. This off-Broadway approach to film has long been the operating model of most indies, which puts a premium on cost savings and artistic vision, which is probably why so many of them are filmed in the Valley.
That model, though, has already begun to unwind. Studios are now more like a franchise support center than a destination for centralized content creation; development execs are increasingly unwilling to greenlight anything that isn’t the kind of tentpole IP that can spawn a multiverse, doesn’t drive theme park traffic, or can’t be merchandised and outlicensed ad nauseum.
So…if your job exists outside of the studio system, but depends on having proximity to studio facilities, equipment or crew (basically, Burbank), the operating environment has fundamentally changed, becoming much less centralized and much more verticalized. What was an open ecosystem is now a walled garden, and the economics of the industry are largely to blame.
On the plus side, indies are finally starting to figure out how to operate without having to be essentially dependent on the major production companies, studios or legacy media to produce and promote their properties.
Unfortunately, that transition remains ongoing, and remains pretty messy, requiring an increasingly complex and costly shooting schedules, line budgets built on an entirely different set of assumptions than the ones originally used to obtain financing, and having to locate productions in places that are cheap, if inconvenient (this is why Eastern Europe and the Cotswolds are such hot filming locations at the moment).
Look: if you can position yourself as someone who actually understands these changes, and knows how the indie and international entertainment ecosystems actually work today (not just how it used to work a decade or so ago), expect steady work and a lot of demand in the growing independent and international film markets.
It might not pay as well as back when Fox Searchlight or Focus Features were somehow considered “indie” labels, and it’s decidedly less sexy, but at least you’ll have more options than most other entertainment professionals, who still treat the studios like the center of gravity in an increasingly insular universe.
2. Cannes 2026: Come for the Prestige, Stay for the Queer Slasher Camp
The dominant aesthetic at Cannes 2026 wasn’t a genre, exactly. It was more like a whole vibe, as LGBTQ+ filmmakers had what can only be described as a moment, with queer titles dominating the competition slate, the sidebar programs and the post-screening conversations.
It likely wasn’t part of some grand plan or some soft influence campaign funded by Soros-backed progressive interests. The explosion of queer cinema seemed spontaneous and perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist, and of course, the sensibilities of cineastes who pay beaucoup bucks to watch obscure, first-run films while summering off the French Riviera; somewhere, over the rainbow, there’s probably a Palm D’Or or two lying around.
This year’s more notable LGBTQIA Canal Plus titles included Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek as a gay performance artist navigating the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York (sold as an original story, since they had already made a Basquiat biopic).
The role is something of a stretch for Malek, who won an Academy Award playing Freddy Mercury, which is likely why the film got a reported 10 minute standing ovation and put Malek back in the awards conversation for the first time since Bohemian Rhapsody, which definitely had nothing to do with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s or gay performance art.
Similarly, Lukas Dhont’s WWI drama Coward, which seemed to be going for the Heated Rivalry audience, only this time, queer love on the hockey rink has been replaced by queer love during trench warfare (talk about being in the foxholes together), drew mixed critical reviews but received more buyer interest than perhaps any other property at this year’s festival.
Erstwhile streamer Mubi had secured the North American rights before the end credits had even rolled (literally), leaving many to wonder what a “Mubi” is and how they have such a deep war chest for acquiring niche arthouse properties. Queer, indeed.
Meanwhile, the Spanish directing duo known as “The Javis” (Calvo and Ambrossi, respectively) somehow got a 20 minute standing O for La Bola Negra, described as a “multi-generational queer epic spanning the Spanish Civil War and beyond,” which isn’t exactly the kind of high concept that usually ends with distribution deals.
Jordan Fisherman’s Club Kid, meanwhile, opened to rave reviews, even if it kind of looked like an Adam Sandler movie set at a Manhattan warehouse sex party – although apparently, this kid’s in a pretty exclusive club, as the film proved to be the hottest ticket at Cannes – and one of the more expensive titles sold this year.
Meanwhile, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opened Un Certain Regard, the high-profile showcase that’s historically been a showcase for Hollywood awards contenders – but, without any real Hollywood projects on the program, festival goers had to settle for a low-budget “queer slasher” film instead.
Which, honestly, sounds way more interesting than anything Hollywood has released since Robert Evans’ retirement.
Read more:Cannes Film Market Opens With Focus Shifting to Smaller Films (Reuters)
Why This Matters for Your Career
While industry coverage makes this trend seem a bit like Identity Politics, the Motion Picture (™), this year’s queer-centered entrants had unique, interesting stories and characters with way more to say than some hollow analysis and well-meaning posturing.
The reason the gays cleaned up this year isn’t because of some ideological shift towards the left or that Cannes’ programming team decided it was finally time to go woke and embrace diversity – that’s pretty much been their MO since the mid-80s.
The reason gay got played this year is the reflection of a decade plus of LBGTQ+ filmmakers and artists building an entirely parallel infrastructure within the international and independent cinematic universes: from producers to financiers, from distributors to creative collaborators, this corner of the industry has effectively built a system that’s built to greenlight ‘edgy’ or ‘provocative’ projects far easier than their straight, studio funded counterparts, who are more concerned with placating audiences than enabling auteurship or artistic vision.
The result is work that’s more idiosyncratic, more personal, and frankly more watchable than most of what the majors are spitting out. In a year when the majors didn’t even bother to show up, that contrast became even starker than usual.
So, if you’re in development, production, or acquisitions, the takeaway here isn’t “make more queer movies” (although, sure, also that – they have a defined, largely niche audience that doesn’t need a lot of advertising spend to fill theatres, instead relying on word of mouth marketing and a lot of discretionary income to help drive queer-themed properties to profitability).
More importantly, though, the takeaway is that t the most interesting talent and IP today is often coming out of communities and ecosystems that traditional industry talent scouts have historically overlooked, dismissed, or actively excluded.
Whether that’s queer cinema, international auteurs, regional film scenes, or whatever’s bubbling up on Substack and TikTok, the people who are good at scouting outside their usual networks are going to keep finding the next wave first.
Except, of course, for the cottage industry of “faith-based films,” which, let’s face it, kind of suck. We can’t wait for the next installment of the Passion – easily our favorite ever snuff film directed by a virulent anti-Semite. God’s children are not for sale, but they’ll buy just about anything.
3. A Franc Look at theMacron-omics of Independent Film
The Cannes Film Market, or Marche du Film if you’re trying to impress someone at a rooftop bar in Antibes, is the part of the festival where the actual business gets done. It’s where international sales agents pitch titles to distributors, where distribution rights get bought and sold by territory, and where the entire indie film economy lives or dies in a 12 day window. For the first week of this year’s festival, it was a ghost town.
Then, sometime around the midway point, the mood shifted. A24 reportedly paid $17 million for worldwide rights to Club Kid, which is a lot of money for a Jordan Firstman comedy about gay clubbing in the early aughts, but also exactly the kind of swing A24 takes that other distributors have stopped taking (this is the studio that produced not one, but two Me3an movies and just announced a Longlegs sequel).
Netflix, meanwhile, went on a shopping spree, because that extra ten bucks a month they’re charging for subscriptions is certainly funding quite the acquisition budget. The streamerclosed on US rights to The Black Ball (not, surprisingly, one of the aforementioned queer projects in competition this year, despite star turns from Penelope Cruz and Glenn Close).
It also picked up In Waves, the Park Chan-wook revenge western starring Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei (if there’s one thing Netflix development execs can’t say no to, it’s excessively violent Korean genre projects – “green light!”).
By the time the festival closed, the deal volume was still a little lower than usual, but this year, entertainment and media is anything but usual; the good news is, the production quality, scripts and performances seemed unilaterally higher quality than most festival slates in recent memory, and while Hollywood wasn’t in attendance, the indie sector proved that it still rolls deep – and knows how to throw a party – even if their yachts are a bit smaller and their parties a bit less Caligula with swag bags than their studio counterparts
Read more:A24 Wins Bidding War for Club Kid (The Hollywood Reporter)
Why This Matters for Your Career
The Cannes market is a useful proxy for the broader indie ecosystem, partly because it’s where the actual money changes hands, and partly because everyone who matters in independent film attends. When the market is sluggish, it usually means distributors are spooked, financing is tight and the next 18 months of indie releases are going to be thin. When the market suddenly catches fire, it usually means at least some segment of the buyer pool has decided to start spending again.
What we saw this year was a bifurcated market. A small handful of well-capitalized buyers (A24, Netflix, Mubi, Warner Bros.’s nascent Clockworks label) are actively in the hunt for prestige titles, while the rest of the market is sitting on its hands waiting for the macro picture to clarify.
That dynamic isn’t great if you’re a smaller distributor trying to compete, but it’s actually pretty good news if you’re a filmmaker, agent or producer with quality material to sell.
The trick, increasingly, is understanding which buyers are actually in the market and which ones are just there for the rose. If you’re in sales, acquisitions or anything adjacent to indie distribution, your value to the industry is now almost entirely about market intelligence. Who’s buying, who’s not, what they’re paying, and why.
The people who can answer those questions in real time are going to keep getting hired; the ones still operating off last year’s relationships are going to find their LinkedIn inboxes getting awfully quiet.
4. Breaking News: The French Are Pissed Off at Something Relatively Minor
If American media coverage of Cannes tends to skew toward the red carpet and the awards horse race, then it almost completely missed the most consequential storyline of the festival, which had nothing to do with film at all. It had to do with a billionaire, a media conglomerate and a 3,500 person open letter that basically declared war on the most powerful media mogul in France.
The villain (or hero, if your political orientation runs a bit, well, MAGA) is Vincent Bollore, the right-wing French industrialist who controls Canal+ and is currently in the middle of an attempt to absorb UGC, France’s third-largest theater chain. Think: Rupert Murdoch meets Strom Thurmond meets Pepe La Pew, but way more over the top.
For context, Monsieur Bollore has spent the past decade systematically buying up French media properties and reshaping their editorial direction to match his politics, before the Washington Post made it cool.
Now, he’s coming for the country’s theatrical exhibition business, which a lot of French filmmakers reasonably see as the last line of defense against a vertically integrated national media industry that’s xenophobic, racist, sexist and ideologically regressive – kinda like CBS under the Bari Weiss regime.
About 600 French film professionals, including globally recognized icons like Juliette Binoche, Adele Haenel and Swann Arlaud,signed an open letter on the eve of the festival’s opening calling Bollore’s planned expansion a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination” (or, as we call it in the US, “Grok”).
Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada responded bythreatening to blacklist anyone who signed it, which was approximately the worst PR move imaginable; the petition ultimately grew to over 3,500 signatures, including international names like Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, Yorgos Lanthimos and Ken Loach, all of whom recently leveraged their public platforms loudly advocating against Israel and on behalf of Hamas – only this time, apparently, they’re opposed to terrorist propaganda.
Audiences at Cannes screenings booed every time the Canal+ or Studiocanal logos appeared, which was actually kind of entertaining; meanwhile, France’s largest entertainment workers union announced a major lawsuit in an urgent attempt to preempt this hostile takeover…just as soon as they return from their three-month vacations.
With French elections looming and the National Rally polling well, this fight is just getting started – and while we’re not sure who’s going to surrender first, the Maginot Lines have been drawn.
Read more:Canal+ CEO Threatens to Blacklist Talents Who Oppose Owner (The Hollywood Reporter)
Why This Matters for Your Career
Even if you’ve never set foot in Paris and your only exposure to French cinema is whatever Mubi pushes into your feed, this is a wild story that’s worth paying attention to, mainly because it’s like a trailer for the coming attractions that are about to hit the US media landscape as the industry continues its lurch to the right in the wake of an unabated wave of consolidations and mergers.
We can’t wait to see what happens when the Ellisons finally get full control over Tik Tok and Warner Bros. Discovery; we don’t know what to expect, but we’re expecting to be offended – if not by identity politics, then by the mechanics of late stage capitalism.
When media consolidation reaches a certain threshold, you stop having an industry and start having a handful of fiefdoms run by people whose actual interests have very little to do with the work itself. Editorial independence gets compromised. Career mobility shrinks. Workers lose leverage because there are fewer competing buyers for their labor. And the political and ideological agenda of whoever’s holding the equity quietly starts to set the boundaries of what gets greenlit, marketed and distributed.
We’ve already seen versions of this play out at Twitter, the LA Times, the Washington Post, CBS News, and a half dozen other outlets that used to operate independently and now don’t. The Nexstar-Tegna deal we covered a couple weeks back is the local TV version of the same phenomenon; the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger that’s pending federal review will be the studio version.
If you work in any kind of journalism, news production or content creation, the lesson here is that consolidation isn’t an abstract industry trend. It’s an actual threat to your editorial independence, your job security, and ultimately your ability to do the work you got into this business to do. The French are showing what an organized creative class actually pushing back at consolidation looks like.
Whether American workers in the same business have the same appetite for that fight remains very much an open question.
5. AI Showed Up and No One Even Tried to Stop It Anymore
The single most jarring visual from Cannes 2026 was a humanoid robot (technically, this would make it a Cyborg) wandering the Croisette, looking suspiciously like the cold open of a Black Mirror episode or a Philip K. Dick adaptation. The rise of the machines is here, only instead of destroying civilization, they’re doing red carpet step and repeats, eating canapes at press junkets, and making The Mandalorian and Goku seem timely and relevant (this atrocity should never have been made – consider yourself warned).
The festival itself has officially banned films using generative AI from competition, which sounds principled until you realize that Meta signed on as a multi-year official partner of the festival, and that AI tools were used in the production of the much anticipated John Lennon documentary from glasses wearing film geek Steven Soderbergh, which screened out of competition, absent any sex, lies or even a videotape.
The official position of Cannes is that AI is not part of the festival’s artistic and creative mandate, and that it’s not welcome at the Croisette, but the truth is, AI was ubiquitous at Cannes – it just happened to be backstage and below the line, where the public and press would fail to notice the dystopian hellscape that our world has become, a distraction somewhat aided by beautiful people in skimpy beachwear, the azure waves of the Mediterranean, and, of course, Vin Diesel sobbing in public.
Demi Moore, who sat on this year’s jury, said the quiet part out loud at the opening press conference, declaring that fighting AI “is a battle we will lose” (much like her experience in marriage counseling with Ashton Kutcher) and that the industry needs to find ways to “work with it,” which is the same pitch her agent used to land her the lead in The Substance.
Beyond the film festival, this year’s Cannes featured something called the “AI for Talent Summit,” which positioned the technology as ethical, secure, and a great way to “enhance, not replace” human creativity, which sounds a lot like the first couple slides in a McKinsey presentation – and probably proof that when it comes to AI, resistance is as futile as trying to sell a screenplay on spec.
Read more:The AI 25: People Shaping Hollywood’s Future (The Hollywood Reporter)
Why This Matters for Your Career
The AI conversation in entertainment has gone through three distinct phases in about 18 months.
Phase one was, of course, denial, where everyone insisted the technology wasn’t really good enough to matter. Phase two was inevitably widespread panic, as the WGA went on strike over AI protections, with everyone agreeing that strong guardrails were urgent and necessary for AI to have a future in the entertainment and media businesses. Phase three, which Cannes proved we’re now firmly in, is one of what can only be described as an uneasy (and unnatural) forced normalization.
AI-enabled tech is already completely embedded into production pipelines, post-production workflows, marketing, distribution analytics, casting, scriptwriting, and basically every other phase of the business. The question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to use it without getting shamed or sued for doing so.
For anyone working in creative fields, saying that these are fraught times is something of an understatement. The most extreme position – AI is unilaterally bad, and we’ll never use these tools, on principle – is becoming increasingly untenable (and vapid).
These maximalist views are just a tacit admission that you’re going to get beaten by the competition on cost, speed and scale, but might win on morality. Conversely, the strategy of championing AI as a fix for pretty much any use case is also not a great look (except maybe on LinkedIn), since it signals that you place more of a value on high tech than high touch, and that you’re choosing efficiency over craft, and technology over creativity – which, let’s face it, is the way things are going, but it’s not the best look for anyone in this business.
Long term, the industry has to figure out that the truth – and the only truly sustainable approach to AI – lies somewhere in the middle, as a tool that augments and extends your work and professional capabilities without replacing your emotions, judgment, or creativity.
The debate about AI in entertainment, after all, has nothing to do with technology – it’s really all about labor economics, since studios want AI not to make existing work better, but rather, to extract more work from fewer workers, with quality completely irrelevant to the business of entertainment today (as anyone who’s seen a Marvel or Star Wars movie in the past decade or so could tell you).
If your career involves doing the same sort of work that AI has already proven its capable of, but at a fraction of the cost, your window of opportunity to pivot towards uniquely human work that’s immune to AI is rapidly closing.
Things like vision, deep specialization and experience, strong relationships and an engaged network, great taste, solid judgement and the ability to tell a story that connects with human audiences and has some sort of emotional resonanceare skills which will always command a premium, and will remain valuable assets for any creative professional hoping to build some modicum of a steady, stable career in a business that’s anything but.
If AI can do your job for you, then you should probably start looking for a new one before it’s too late. Trust us on this one.
Final Cut: Another Year in the Cannes.
Cannes always functions as a kind of industry mirror. You walk in, you see what the business actually looks like (as opposed to what it tells itself it looks like), and you walk out with a slightly better sense of where things are heading. This year, the mirror showed a few uncomfortable things.
The studios have decided cinema as an art form is no longer a strategic priority, and they’re acting accordingly. The indie ecosystem is evolving in ways that don’t necessarily favor the people who’ve spent the past 20 years building careers in it. Queer cinema, international auteurs and outsider talent are quietly filling the creative void left by the mainstream’s retreat.
Media consolidation is sparking organized resistance in some markets, but mostly proceeding unopposed in others. And AI has officially won the argument about whether it belongs in the conversation, even if the terms of its participation are still very much TBD.
None of this is necessarily bad news. The industry has been here before, just with different villains and slightly different cast lists. The disruption of the studio system in the 1960s was traumatic for the people losing their jobs, but it produced the New Hollywood era and arguably the greatest decade of American filmmaking in history.
The collapse of the DVD market in the 2000s killed off whole categories of working creatives, but it also forced the industry to figure out streaming, which (whatever its current problems) has dramatically expanded the global audience for serious filmmaking.
The question this time around is whether the entertainment industry can figure out how to evolve without losing what made it worth caring about in the first place. The answer, judging by Cannes 2026, is “probably, but not without a fight.”
Which is exactly what you’d expect from a business that, despite everything, still attracts the most stubborn, talented, and self-mythologizing people in the workforce.
The good news is, you’re one of them. The bad news is, so is everyone else competing for your job.
See you at the after party (or, ideally, the hotel lobby),
Matt Charney
Executive Editor, Mediabistro
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