Intro for April 10, 2026

Dear Gossips,

The Cannes Film Festival begins in just over a month, and the lineup was announced yesterday. Notably, there is only one American film in competition, Ira Sachs’ musical, The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek. There is a noticeable lack of US-produced studio films at Cannes, which usually features a Hollywood movie as an out-of-competition premiere, and has frequently had US studio films in competition. Of the absence, Thierry Frémaux, artistic director of Cannes, said: “I feel nostalgic for that golden age when studios used to produce a lot of films, every month, auteur films…”

This is a “Bong Joon-ho calling the Oscars local” level burn, though Frémaux does note that the US film industry has had a very bad run these last six years, from COVID to strikes to fires, and now merger mania, which is contracting an already shrinking industry even more. A lot of people have compared the current challenges facing the US film industry to the disruption of sound circa 1930, but no. The arrival of digital/streaming technology in the 2000s/early 2010s is the equivalent of the arrival of sound in cinema. What is happening now is driven by hyper-conglomeration. It has nothing to do with technology—except for how every media CEO is desperate to be a tech CEO—and everything to do with craven business interests.

This is not to say that the Cannes lineup looks bad. It doesn’t, it looks very good, including new films from Nicolas Winding Refn, Cristian Mungiu (making his English-language debut with Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan), Hirokazu Kore-eda, Jane Schoenbrun, Asghar Farhadi, Pedro Almodóvar, Lukas Dhont, Paweł Pawlikowski, Guillame Canet, Jordan Firstman making his feature directorial debut, and, um, John Travolta directing his daughter, Ella, in a family film about planes. One of these things is not like another.

So, it will be an auteur-driven festival that will seem very international to American audiences. Frémaux has hinted that James Gray’s Paper Tigers may yet be added to the lineup, which stars Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller, though that film is still an independent production that currently does not have distribution. If it does go to Cannes—Kristen Stewart’s Chronology of Water was a late addition last year—it will presumably be part of the film market, too, searching for a distributor. So while there could still be some more American films added to the lineup, it’s doubtful we’ll get a Hollywood studio film at Cannes this year.

And that is indicative of the overall state of Hollywood, which is maniacally risk adverse, at present, as every company seeks a merger with another company. Studios are physically making less movies—and no promise made by David Ellison is going to change that any time soon—and the ones they do make are carefully calibrated for four-quadrant success, meaning they have to appeal to everyone. I really like Project Hail Mary, but don’t tell me there isn’t a version of that film that leans more into the obvious love affair between Grace and Stratt, but that would potentially add too-adult themes that would alienate younger audiences. So, Ryland Grace is the handsomest sexless man in existence.

As dour as I can sound on the subject—and I know! It’s pretty damn dour!—I do genuinely believe Hollywood will come through this moment. It just won’t be intact. It will be a different entity, the same way it was a different entity after the collapse of the old studio system, and it was a different entity again after the last round of conglomeration in the 1980s. The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is probably a portent that the studio system of the past 30 years has been pushed as far as it can go without significant metamorphosis.

I just hope that whatever is on the other side is at least a little more equitable than what we currently have. For everyone who said you don’t care about young actors signing “bad” contracts and still making over a million dollars, David Zaslav is poised to walk away from Warner Bros. Discovery with a $880+ million golden parachute. I hope the same “no one deserves that much” energy exists for Zaz.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah