2026 Cannes Film Festival 5 Takeaways: AI, Queer Cinema

Cannes usually delivers at least one full-throttle Hollywood moment. Last year, Tom Cruise brought Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning to the Palais, the same place he debuted Top Gun: Maverick in 2022. This year, Hollywood stayed home, with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (The Odyssey) and Steven Spielberg (Disclosure Day) preferring to fly past the Croisette. There was not a single studio movie to grace that famous red carpet.

It was telling that the festival’s biggest red-carpet crowd was for a 25-year-old Universal action franchise. The midnight anniversary screening of The Fast and the Furious drew a massive cheering both outside the Palais and inside the theater, in a celebration that brought even Vin Diesel to tears. It was a touching moment, but also a quietly damning one for a festival that had to go back a quarter century to find its Hollywood moment.

The reasons the majors stayed home are manifold. Cannes is expensive, the critics can be merciless, and the box office bump for a festival premiere is never guaranteed. (The Cannes launch of Mission: Impossible 8 didn’t appear to help much when the film finally hit theaters). Warner Bros.’ success last year with One Battle After Another and Sinners — two Academy Award-winning blockbusters that skipped the festival circuit — suggests Cannes needs the studios more than the studios need Cannes.

LGBTQ+ cinema ruled Cannes this year. The biggest and hottest movies of the festival focused on queer characters, themes, or perspectives.

In competition, Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek as a gay performance artist navigating the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, received a 10-minute ovation and chatter about an awards run for the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody star.

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

Outside competition, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opened Un Certain Regard and Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, a comedy that feels like an Adam Sandler movie with drugs and dolls, was the festival’s hottest ticket.

Ask anyone in the first week, and the Marché felt like a wake. Ask them in the final days and the mood had shifted considerably. After a sluggish opening week that left many sellers staring at their phones, the Cannes Film Market found something like a second wind in its final days, with a flurry of high-profile acquisitions injecting some much-needed energy into what had been a cautious, defensive Marché.

The deal that set the tone arrived early: Jordan Firstman’s Cannes breakout Club Kid sold to A24 after a heated bidding war, with the indie distributor paying out a reported $17 million for worldwide rights to the surprisingly sweet (and nearly family-friendly) comedy set in the gay clubbing scene.

Then came the late surge.

Netflix picked up animated feature In Waves, and, at the time of writing, is close to securing domestic rights to festival favorite The Black Ball (La Bola Negra) starring Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, and the Léa Seydoux title Gentle Monster. Both look like award plays for the streamer. Warner Bros.’ nascent specialty label Clockworks, which brought a restored version of Ken Russell’s 1971 classic The Devils to screen in Cannes Classics, is in talks to take Park Chan-wook’s The Brigands of Rattlecreek, a revenge Western written by Bone Tomahawk writer/director S. Craig Zahler and set to star Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei for North America. If it closes, it would be a significant statement of intent for the newly minted WB division.

It may not have been a vintage year for deal volume but there was a sense of quality over quantity and, by the close, some hopeful signs of green shoots for the indie film industry.

The biggest drama at Cannes 2026 was off-screen and involved a growing civil war between French film industry professionals and the country’s top studio, Canal+.

On the eve of the festival, some 600 French film professionals, including Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel and Swann Arlaud, signed an open letter protesting Vincent Bolloré, the right-wing media mogul who is the leading shareholder in Canal+. The letter didn’t mince words, calling Bolloré’s expanding French media empire — he is already a leading force in film and TV production and, through Canal+, is planning a takeover of UGC, the country’s third-largest theatrical exhibitor — a “fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”

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

By the end of the festival, there were more than 3,500 names on the petition. France’s biggest trade union representing entertainment workers has said it will file a lawsuit against Canal+ for Saada’s blacklisting threat. The audiences at Cannes screenings made their feelings clear by loudly booing the Canal+ and Studiocanal logos whenever they appeared on the big screen.

With French elections next year and the far-right National Rally party expected to challenge for the presidency, this particular French film drama is nowhere near its climax.

A humanoid robot spotted marching up and down the Croisette seemed to sum up the worst AI fears of the film industry — the machines have arrived and they are taking your place. But inside the Palais and the market tents, the conversation over artificial intelligence had moved beyond fear into something more like uneasy acceptance.

Fighting AI “is a battle we will lose,” said Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this year, at the festival’s opening press conference, suggesting the film industry needs to “find ways in which we can work with it.”

That’s not the official Cannes line. The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup. But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted.

AI-friendly tech giant Meta signed on as an official partner to the festival in a multiyear deal. Its AI tools were used to help produce a [out of competition] festival entry: Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. At the Marché du Film, there was an “AI for Talent Summit” that took the AI revolution as given, focusing instead on ethical AI use, data sovereignty and on the ways the technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity.

For the indie film industry, it felt like a turning point.