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I’m headed to Cannes! If you are too, let me know: [email protected] or text me on Google Voice: 323-435-7690.
With the 2026 Cannes Film Festival comes the annual ritual of belief: A film’s value is determined in a concentrated moment, when buyers, press, and audiences converge.
That implicit agreement has governed independent film for decades and still shapes how films get made. It no longer reflects how they succeed.
Everyone in this ecosystem knows the terms. Build a film around the festival calendar. Hold it back from audiences, from the market, from any real exposure until the system decides when and how it should be seen. Protect the premiere and wait.
In exchange, filmmakers get something that doesn’t exist anywhere else: a shot at discovery, acquisition, and attention concentrated into maximum leverage.
That deal is breaking. Minimum guarantees have become de minimis and are no longer guaranteed. The overnight sale — the version of Sundance that shaped (rightly or not) decades of filmmaker strategy — is now an outlier. Buyers concentrate on fewer titles, at fewer festivals, with less urgency and less capital.
Sundance 2025 had three sales during the festival (four, if you count the “Peter Hujar’s Day” pickup right after the festival ended). Eventually, about three-quarters of the program secured some form of distribution. It took most of the calendar year to get there.
One shot, diminishing returns
it starts to look like a very odd bargain. Filmmakers still build production timelines around submission deadlines, rush unfinished cuts, hold back material that could build an audience — all to be among thousands of submissions competing for a handful of slots that may or may not generate a meaningful outcome.
And yet: Festival audiences are growing.
Eventive, a platform that helps independent cinemas, film festivals, and filmmakers manage ticketing, streaming, and audience engagement recently published a white paper that analyzed more than 15 million ticket sales across 6,000 festival editions.
It found that attendance rebounded from the pandemic and stabilized at a higher baseline. Average attendance per festival is up roughly 34 percent since 2021, while revenue per ticket reached its highest level on record.
Behind the numbers
Great news, right? It’s also a nest of structural tensions. Festivals have begun to feel less essential to the industry even as they become more meaningful to audiences.
Virtual screenings make that tension visible. Eventive’s data said they accounted for roughly a quarter of total attendance. While that’s significant growth for the festival as an audience experience, it’s a persistent source of friction for the festival as a market. With virtual access reducing the urgency to be there in person, sales agents complain that buyers now send smaller staffs.
Even as audiences grow, festival organizers acknowledge on background that industry attention has thinned. (Certainly, that was one reason that Sundance chose to relocate to the more-affordable Boulder, Colorado.) Festival coverage has declined, although that reflects the state of publishing as much as anything else.
The split
That’s an acute disconnect for early-career filmmakers weighing whether the traditional path justifies the cost and risk. Is it worth structuring an entire production cycle to compete for one of a hundred slots when the press and buying opportunities are in decline?
For decades, festivals functioned as a central nervous system for discovery, press, acquisition, and audience. Now, discovery is increasingly decentralized. Distribution is fragmented. Audience-building can happen anywhere, and it certainly doesn’t hew to the festival calendar. The market no longer guarantees outcomes.
Sundance’s move to tech-friendly Boulder is one signal of where festivals think the opportunity is. Festival leadership has acknowledged that Park City’s cost structure had effectively priced out a generation of creators — the person who showed up in their 20s on a bunk bed budget while trying to figure it out. That’s the digitally native generation of content creators who find their way without festivals. If Sundance is going to court that audience, they’ll need to meet them where they are.
As festivals concentrate attention but no longer control what happens to it, their roles have shifted from controlling outcomes to creating conditions. The traditional launchpad is now one leverage point of many in a larger system — including creator-driven strategies that don’t care about festivals at all.
I was struck by that shift in an unexpected moment while watching the recent Markiplier livestream. His opening line: “I’m going to need to be here a while, while people get in.”
He was talking about waiting for viewers to join the stream. However, that audience wasn’t hypothetical. It was gathering in real time and the work began once they arrived. For him, thinking about timing, attention, engagement, and presence is a given.
That doesn’t replace the festival model. But it operates on a fundamentally different premise: Filmmakers don’t wait for the system to convene the audience. They build and meet them directly.
This is where festivals find themselves in a genuinely new position. They still do something few systems can — gather audiences in concentrated, physical space around independent work, and the data makes clear that demand for that experience is not shrinking.
However, the connection between festival audience and long-term outcome remains remarkably weak. Films can play to full houses and still struggle to convert that momentum. (There’s a reason that American studios passed on Cannes this year.) The energy exists in the room (all those standing ovations!), but rarely extends beyond it.
Attention without translation
There’s the gap. The missing layer is translation — turning concentrated attention into durable value for filmmakers.
Cannes will open as it always does with premieres, deals, and headlines. It still matters, but it no longer defines the system on its own.
Festivals run on scarcity and the current environment runs on abundance: many paths, many audiences, many possible outcomes, none guaranteed. Those two systems now sit on top of each other, uneasily.
Festivals are not going away; the data makes that clear. But their roles are changing, from gatekeepers of access to curators of attention. The next question is whether they can turn that attention into something that works for filmmakers — because the real value was never the premiere. It was what the premiere made possible.
Right now, that translation is breaking. Something that doesn’t wait is beginning to replace it.
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