The Toronto and New York Film Festivals, in turn, feel more accessible to the general public and are, on the whole, like Telluride, friendlier places to land new releases. Marty Supreme, for instance, was warmly received at its New York Film Festival premiere and ended up with nine Oscar nominations. (Again, criticism came later.) And Toronto’s People’s Choice Award has long been a best-picture bellwether—Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire et al have all scooped both. So a Toronto debut can massively boost a movie—but if it bombs, it doesn’t feel as seismic as a major Venice flop.
And then there is, of course, the option to swerve all of that entirely. The two most successful films from this year’s awards season, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, both eschewed festivals and still managed to become box-office hits and critical successes. It’s proof that a different path is possible, sometimes even preferable.
On the flip side, a movie like Joker: Folie à Deux, the Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix-fronted sequel to Todd Phillips’s double Oscar-winning, Golden Lion recipient Joker, would have had a baked-in audience had it gone straight to theaters. But it went to Venice first, was torn to shreds by critics, and found itself subsequently ignored by awards bodies and losing millions when it did open. Is it a surprise, then, that Digger (which, like Folie à Deux, is produced by Warner Brothers) would skip Venice? Given this new film features a transformative, potentially awards-worthy performance from the eternally bankable Tom Cruise, why wager its success—monetary, critical, and otherwise—on a roll of the dice on the Lido? It’s a film that just doesn’t need that platform.
As a result, the films that will be at Venice this year, and are likely to keep coming to the festival in the years to come, are those which that a more indie sensibility and decidedly less to lose, rather than guaranteed moneymakers that were themselves expensive to finance; more experimental, off-the-wall work that will benefit from the attention Venice can bring it, regardless of the tenor of reviews.
In fairness, Cannes is in the same boat—back in the spring, there were zero Hollywood studio movies on the Croisette, with headline-grabbing bombs like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023 acting as a reminder of the potential perils of bringing a blockbuster to the festival. Still, this time around, the lack of behemoths sucking up all the oxygen meant more breathing room for smaller and more international releases, including Cristian Mungiu’s eventual Palme d’Or winner Fjord and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix-winning Minotaur. It’s likely that both films will show up in the Oscar race come 2027.
Venice, too, in the absence of bigger, noisier movies, has been catapulting smaller releases that might otherwise have been overlooked onto the global stage. Last year, for instance, a line-up light on studio fare saw the second-place Grand Jury prize awarded to Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. Months later, it went on to get a best-international-feature Oscar nomination.
