For the first time since 2017, not a single film from a major Hollywood studio is premiering at Cannes. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey isn't here. Neither is Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger, or David Fincher's Cliff Booth. The films exist. The studios chose not to bring them. [1]

This paper established when Cannes opened with Salvadori's comedy in a protest year that Hollywood's absence would define the festival as much as the competition slate. Two days in, that assessment holds. The absence is not accidental; it is a calculation that has been running for several years and has now produced its most complete expression.

The studios give two explanations, depending on who is asking. The first is logistical: some films weren't completed in time for the competition. The second is financial: the cost of flying A-list talent to a Mediterranean resort town, securing them, and managing a marketing operation for a film opening months later can run into seven figures, and the return on that investment has become harder to quantify. [1]

Neither explanation names Gaza. Neither explanation accounts for the fact that the studios' absence this year follows a press conference at which a Cannes jury member named Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo as blacklisted by Hollywood for opposing the war. If there is a connection between the industry's posture toward those actors and its decision not to show up at the festival where its absence becomes its most visible statement, no studio executive has made that connection on the record. [2]

Into the vacuum has moved Neon.

The specialty distributor has nine films at this year's festival. It has backed six consecutive Palme d'Or winners — an unprecedented streak in the competition's history. Its acquisitions president Jeff Deutchman has said the company has "a slate people are going to be really excited about," ranging from Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden to Na Hong-jin's Hope to James Gray's Paper Tiger. [1] Neon is, by market footprint, the primary US flag on the Croisette. It is also a company whose annual revenues are a fraction of any major studio's marketing budget.

The question the market is asking is whether Neon's dominance at Cannes reflects a deliberate counter-programming strategy — a decision to occupy the space Hollywood vacated — or whether it is simply the opportunistic positioning of a company that has been building this Cannes pipeline for several years and happens to be at its peak moment when the studios step back. The two readings are not mutually exclusive.

The distribution landscape that surrounds this story has a structural dimension that the festival does not officially address. Vincent Bolloré's media consolidation has reshaped which European companies control distribution channels and which operate under constraint. Which European distributors can aggressively acquire at Cannes and which feel the pressure of consolidated ownership shapes the market's composition as surely as the studio absences shape the competition slate. European independents navigating this landscape are doing so in a year when both the dominant American presence and the political pressure on the jury are running at maximum intensity simultaneously.

The studios' calculation that Cannes has become more risk than reward is not irrational. French critics are notoriously tough. Social media pile-ons after a bad reception can precede a domestic release by months. The speculative acquisition environment that produced outsized festival deals has cooled; pricing discipline now matters more than prestige positioning. [1]

What the studios may be underestimating is the cost of the absence itself. Cannes sets the tone for what serious cinema looks like in a given year. When the jury president is Park Chan-wook and the jury member speaking most loudly is Paul Laverty, and the only American institutional presence is a specialty distributor with nine films in competition, the definition of what American cinema means at this festival is being written by people the studios did not choose to send.

They can return next year. The story being told about them this week will have been told by then.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London