Hello from an early-morning train after a week at the Cannes Film Festival. I’m taking away memories of the blood geysers in Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” my Future of Filmmaking chat with Tim Heidecker at our American Pavilion, and reminding “Club Kid” auteur Jordan Firstman that the last time I saw him, he hosted IndieWire’s Sundance chili party while wearing a tie that said SEMEN. (“I was in an experimental period,” he said.)
However, what surprised me the most were two questions that kept resurfacing in conversations: “Is Cannes the same as it’s been?” and “Are you going to Cannes Lions?”
At first I thought these were variations on classic Cannes small talk (“How long are you here?”), but finally realized that they were different expressions of the same idea. One question is about decline and the other is about emergence, but both are really asking the same thing: Where is the center of gravity in storytelling moving?
Is Cannes Still Cannes?
“Is Cannes the same as it’s been?” is the natural question for a Hollywood in existential crisis and one that largely sat out this edition of the festival altogether. It asks whether the familiar machinery of cinema still functions. Do premieres still create momentum? Do acquisitions still shape the future? Do festivals still operate as the central meeting ground between art, commerce, and cultural authority?
Cannes itself remains deeply invested in continuity. It doesn’t even change the opening trailer that precedes each film: a red-carpeted stairway floating into the heavens, set to Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1886 composition “Aquarium.” This year especially, that permanence seemed reassuring.
At the same time, the festival couldn’t convince a major Hollywood studio to participate in the old tradition of the gala premiere. Prestige alone no longer offsets the risks attached to expensive launches and instant global scrutiny. The acquisition market remained muted too, reinforcing something the industry has spent years resisting: The classic independent film pipeline no longer reliably supports the business built around it.
That helps explain the growing curiosity around Cannes Lions.
Why Cannes Lions
Cannes and Cannes Lions once occupied distinct worlds. One revolved around cinema, auteurs, and prestige. The other centered on advertising, brands, marketing, and commercial storytelling.
Crossing between them wasn’t an issue because it wasn’t a thing. Today, it’s harder to argue that storytelling only operates inside a single economic system.
Cannes Lions, of course, is all about selling — of ads and of brands, in a carnival atmosphere that stretches from the beaches to the villas. (Lions veterans will tell you how quiet the festival seems in comparison.) However, the people asking about Lions want to understand where financing, distribution, audience development, and monetization are actually happening now.
They are looking at creators building direct relationships with audiences, brands financing entertainment, platforms behaving like studios, and technology companies inserting themselves into the creative process. Whether they like those changes or not, they recognize that power is increasingly tied to who owns the audience relationship.
Traditional film logic assumed prestige led to audience attention. Newer storytelling businesses begin with audience attention and build outward from there.
Not everyone is comfortable with that shift. Early in the festival, I had lunch with an industry veteran who grew visibly agitated when I asked about brand participation in filmmaking.
“I want to make films with people,” they said. “I don’t want to talk to a fucking brand.”
I’ve spoken with creators who express the inverse frustration. They are baffled by filmmakers who do not think more aggressively about sustainability, ownership, and business models around their work. As one creator told me, “Indie film really seems more like a culture than a business.”
Cannes takes pride in preserving cinematic tradition, not being an agent of change. Yet the shifts happening around the festival became difficult to ignore.
Meta, now a major festival sponsor, demonstrated its Ray-Ban glasses inside the Majestic Hotel. YouTube partnered with French distributor MK2 for a Friday-night beach party attended by creators including Markiplier and Creator Camp founder Max Reisinger. At a panel, Markiplier announced that “Iron Lung,” his self-distributed theatrical release, would move into digital distribution exclusively through YouTube after bypassing the festival system entirely.
Maybe the Creator Economy Was Right
The Marché du Film hosted its Innovation Pavilion, where filmmaker Darren Aronofsky discussed AI filmmaking. The market’s first-ever Creator Economy Summit featured Scalable principals Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg, who hosted their own sold-out summit earlier this month in Los Angeles. It drew strong interest from executives trying to understand how creator-driven businesses are reshaping entertainment economics. At Lions, of course, the creator economy dominates the narrative altogether.
Others are experimenting with financing models built around audience participation itself. Republic Film founder Mark Iserlis described growing interest in what he calls “audience equity,” where creators raise development funding directly from fans who then become stakeholders and evangelists for projects. Director Robert Rodriguez recently raised $2 million for a new action slate from roughly 2,500 fans through the platform.
“The more you can independently finance a film, hopefully you’re enabling ultimate creative independence,” Iserlis told IndieWire. “You have this built-in audience of investors where you can do heavy marketing for you as evangelists and stakeholders.”
His broader argument reflects a growing belief across entertainment: Maybe the creator economy understood something traditional film economics missed. Where packaging and pre-sales once functioned as infrastructure, audience itself is increasingly becoming the infrastructure.
Now, Indonesia Matters
That logic extends beyond creators themselves. Increasingly, financiers are looking for markets where audience behavior already demonstrates sustainable demand.
This can mean reverse-engineering opportunities around audience behavior. Phil McKenzie, co-founder of UK-based financier Goldfinch, sees major potential in Indonesia’s robust theatrical culture — a market where audiences turn out both for halal cinema (aka family-friendly romances and dramas geared toward Muslim viewers) and for unapologetically commercial horror.
Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar has become one of the country’s breakout international exports: “Satan’s Slaves” found a substantial audience on Shudder, which also acquired “Impetigore” following its international premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Extracting this opportunity will require real spade work. At Cannes, Goldfinch signed a deal with Jakarta to explore talent and film infrastructure development, along with policy studies regarding film-industry incentives. Along with studio lots, the ecosystem, policies, and legislations will need to be built.
It could take years for the first soundstages to come online, but McKenzie believes Indonesia is positioned to be the film industry’s next South Korea. His excitement is contagious, but it is also rooted in the reality that older assumptions are no longer producing the same results.
“We’re still struggling to break out from that US-centric approach,” he said. “You’ve got to find these pockets of opportunity, whatever they look like and whatever they may be.”
Some people are trying to preserve a system they still believe in. Others are trying to build new pathways around it. Most are attempting to understand where audiences, capital, technology, and cultural influence are converging next.
Cannes remains one of the few places where all of those worlds still collide face-to-face. Increasingly, that collision may be the story itself.
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