The Cannes Marché du Film closed Friday with two mid-cap acquisitions to its credit for the year — A24's $17 million pickup of Jordan Firstman's Club Kid out of Un Certain Regard, and Amazon-MGM's roughly $20-million-plus check for Mimi Cave's Pumping Black. Saturday's closing-day major treated the two-check pair as the structural baseline, not an off-cycle dip. As of Sunday morning, no third comparable mid-cap deal has landed in the trade press after Saturday's Palme d'Or ceremony, and the festival adjourns with the pair holding as the year's deals-market document. [1]

The streamer-presence pattern held into the close. Amazon-MGM remains the most active streaming buyer at the Marché; Netflix participated narrowly; Apple was selective. The sub-$50 million-but-above-$5 million acquisition tier, which Cannes' market historically defined for independent-distribution year-planning, is now compressed by two structural moves the paper has named across the week: streaming-platform spending has rotated into original commissions and away from third-party festival pickups, and theatrical-exhibition capacity for mid-cap releases has not recovered from the post-pandemic tentpole concentration. The Marché's two-check ceiling is the visible artifact where those two trends meet.

The AI-as-rights-financing throughline is the year's other transcript. Steven Soderbergh's John Lennon: The Last Interview credited Meta as "technology partner" for roughly 10 of its 90 minutes of generative imagery, premiering Out of Competition with Sean Ono Lennon's blessing and Yoko Ono's silence on the rights question. The Anthropic round and the SpaceX-Anthropic $45 billion compute disclosure landed in the same week. The 79th edition's structural document is therefore one festival, one Palme, one closing political compound, two checks, and one rights-financing precedent. Sunday morning's count remains two.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles