This past May witnessed a very strange Cannes Film Festival come and go. Was the weak competition lineup a warning sign of an industry grappling with a post-pandemic new world? Is cinema, as we know it, in a struggling state?
We won’t really know the answers to these questions for a few years, at least, and probably a couple more Cannes editions in the books. However, one troubling factor to have emerged from this last 75th edition of the fest is the number of competition titles that have yer to be picked up by a US distributor.
Out of curiosity, I checked to see which competition filns still don’t have US distribution:
Boy from Heaven
Brother and Sister
Forever Young
Leila’s Brothers
Mother and Son
Nostalgia
Tchaikovsky’s Wife
The Eight Mountains
There’s eight. That’s a little more than 1/3 of this year’s competition slate. In most years it’s, at most, half that amount that doesn’t get released in the US, so it’ll be interesting to see if any of these films find a home.
There are two prizewinners on this list, they are the most likely to get picked up: The Eight Mountains and Boy from Heaven. The latter especially has good commercial prospects as it is an inaccurately made spy movie set in the Middle East.
Last year’s much larger 24-film competition only had 4 movies that have yet to get US distribution.
UPDATE: “The Eight Mountains” was just picked up by Janus and Sideshow. We can scratch that one off.