June 2026
Nostradamus Perspectives
By Hillevi Gustafson
The End of Hollywood’s Festival Era, or Just Another False Prophecy?
There were no major Hollywood films on the Croisette this year unless you count a midnight anniversary screening of The Fast & The Furious. Studios appear to have taken the success of Sinners and One Battle After Another without any festival presence as their sign to opt out of the circus. Festival launches are expensive and, in a lot of ways, less predictable than a regular theatrical roll-out. This simmering idea seems to have now turned into industry fact: Hollywood is over its festival era. But is this actually true? How real is it that bad festival buzz risks box-office results? And, if Hollywood is done with festivals, is that really a bad thing for the rest of us?
Everyone can agree on Patient Zero. Joker: Folie à Deux. The hotly anticipated sequel starring a beloved comic book-villain seemed destined for success. Its star-studded cast arrived at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 to sparkling fanfare.
And then the reviews started coming out.
Todd Phillips’ first Joker had premiered at Venice in 2019, sparking awards buzz for Joaquin Phoenix, with some mixed reviews, and heated debate about its violence and darker themes. Audiences flocked to cinemas anyway, making it the first R-rated film to pass a billion dollars at the box office. The sequel was expected to perform just as well.
Instead it bombed spectacularly.
The consensus was that harsh festival critics killed it before it could reach “real” audiences. Disney had felt something similar the year before with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, whose rotten post-Cannes score cooled audiences before later reviews could lift it into fresh territory.
Looking beyond giant IP sequels, Eddington and One Battle After Another offer another interesting case study. Eddington, released by A24, is of course a smaller movie in terms of budget. Reportedly, it’s in the $35 million dollar range compared to the $130-170 million dollars that Warner Brothers put into One Battle After Another (not counting marketing spend). However they are both R-rated, heightened dramas from indie darlings (Ari Aster and Paul Thomas Anderson) grappling with the political landscape and conspiracy theories that infuse US society today.
One Battle After Another went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture while Eddington kind of, well, fizzled.
Eddington generated a lot of buzz before its premiere in Cannes and was ‘hotly anticipated’ when A24 brought it to the EFM in advance of its premiere. Pedro Pascal was, at the time, the internet’s favorite boyfriend. But post-premiere the response was best described as ‘muted’. So the two months leading up to the US theatrical release, when general audiences were actually able to see it, was dogged by bad vibes. Warner Brothers opted instead to go directly to theatrical with One Battle After Another, premiering in September and launching the film into a carefully curated awards season push.
The conclusion is that by leaning into embargoed reviews and courting influencers, studios can set their films up for a more robust launch that insulates it from potential bad takes. If there is no guaranteed box-office bump and you don’t need the festival clout to garner awards buzz, then what is the upside for a studio film to show up on the Croisette? One Battle After Another and Sinners showed that the festivals are not the only arbiters of cultural status these days. In a world where there is direct access to audiences through social media and viral moments can be manufactured, as long as you have the money to spend, a fancy red carpet is not the only spectacle that matters.
However, Hollywood departing is not necessarily bad news. Festivals are crucial places for indie films to access international audiences and build momentum, see Anora, Sentimental Value or The Secret Agent as just a few examples. In this age of audio-visual glut, curation is ever more important. Audiences are looking for guides through the cacophony and that is the role festivals can continue to play to stay relevant. The numbers show that audiences at film festivals are still growing and both Berlin and Göteborg hit new records for attendance in 2026. For many independent films, the festival run may be their most important audience window. Yet there is still surprisingly little data on how individual titles actually perform at festivals. That leaves a major blind spot in terms of how films perform. But that's a discussion for another time. Fewer Hollywood studios taking up space at festivals could open up for other voices to break through.
As Johanna put it in this year’s Nostradamus report “as an industry we enjoy stories more than we do numbers, regularly projecting dramatic narratives of hope and despair onto some minor surprise hit or disappointing opening weekend.” Hollywood skips Berlin and Cannes this year? The end of the major blockbuster festival moment forever. What happens if there is even just one Hollywood blockbuster at any of the major festivals next year? Will that negate this truth or just replace it with a new one? Is 2026 the start of a new trend, or just a blip? Time will have to tell. Chasing an overarching lesson from individual moments is difficult and yet we are tempted to do it all the time.
It is also worth noting that this is all happening at a time when consolidation is sweeping Hollywood. Soon one family, the Ellisons, will likely be in control of not only Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery but also several major networks and a big share of TikTok. Realistically, they won’t even have to go outside of their own company in order to access millions. And, with their ties to the Trump administration, there is a real fear of what their politics could do to the industry.
Perhaps the bigger question is not if Hollywood studios will ever come back to festivals, but rather how can the top festivals turn their absence into an opportunity to redefine their own purpose?
If you want to dig deeper:
‘Hollywood Is Trading Cannes’ Uncertainty for Controlled Hype’
‘Did Cannes Just Confirm Hollywood Studios’ Growing Fear of Film Festivals?’