Call it the “Anora” effect.
As the 2025 Cannes Film Festival looms, a halo of optimism hangs over the south of France just two months after Sean Baker’s indie took the Oscars by storm, winning five awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress. The Neon film made its grand debut at Cannes 2024 and rode a wave of enthusiasm all the way to the Dolby Theatre. It’s merely the latest in a line of Cannes films that have found success recently at Hollywood’s most prestigious awards show.
Films like “The Substance,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Drive My Car” and “Parasite” all premiered at Cannes, then found themselves Oscar-nominated less than a year later. Now all eyes are on what will be the buzziest movies at this year’s fest, although hope that the next “Anora” is on tap is tempered somewhat by uncertainty about the market in the wake of ice-cold Sundance sales and worldwide economic anxiety. The name of the game, it seems, is cautious optimism.
“I do think with the success of “Anora” critically, and I would also say financially, it brings more excitement and buzz to what Cannes has to offer this year,” Gersh agent Julien Levesque said of the $6 million film, which grossed more than $20 million in theaters and turned a profit for Neon thanks to premium video on demand (PVOD).
“It changed our mentality. It’s a small-budget film, no names. It wasn’t an easy film and it won a lot of awards,” said Pia Patatian, president of Cloud9 Studios, which is bringing the Guy Pearce erotic thriller “Blurred” and the Toni Collette/Andy Garcia rom-com “Under the Stars” to the Cannes market.
Bleecker Street president Kent Sanderson acknowledged that a lot of specialty distributors have been investing in the production space, which means a number of companies are arriving at Cannes with “full slates.” He also noted that sluggishness in the domestic marketplace is due in part to a “general slowness” in the streaming market for acquisitions and licensing deals, but added that the importance of Cannes has solidified both as an awards-launching plat- form and a source of beloved indies that find their audience courtesy of the Cannes seal of approval.
“I don’t think that there has been a clearer sign of the importance of Cannes to both the domestic and international marketplace, in terms of not only awards but also that the independent and specialized consumer really puts a great deal of value on Cannes for world-premiere films,” Sanderson said. “I think that will hopefully help power a strong acquisitions market.”
This year’s robust festival lineup includes such splashy, star-driven studio titles as Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” (Focus), Ari Aster’s “Eddington” (A24), Scarlett Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great ” (Sony Classics) and, of course, Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning.”
The A-list red carpets for those films are sure to draw attention, but there are several acquisition titles that have buzzy potential as well. Richard Linklater’s French-language “Nouvelle Vague” traces hallowed ground as it charts the birth of the French New Wave movement through the eyes of Jean-Luc Godard, while Harris Dickinson wrote, directed and starred in his feature directorial debut, “Urchin.”
Then there are celebrated filmmakers returning with new films who could see lightning strike again. The two- time Palme d’Or-winning Dardenne brothers are back with “The Young Mother’s House”; Julia Ducournau, who took home the Palme with her 2021 body-horror film “Titane,” has mother-daughter acquisition title “Alpha”; and “The Worst Person in the World” director Joachim Trier will debut his new film “Sentimental Value,” also up for acquisition.
But given the worldwide economic situation, how eager will buyers be to bite should any of these films meet with acclaim? All experts interviewed by TheWrap said tariffs won’t have a direct effect on film sales but pointed out that overall economic stress could put “downward pressure” on the market.
“I don’t think it’s going to be the death knell for the market,” Levesque said of the tariff situation. Palisades Park Pictures CEO Tamara Birkemoe, whose slate includes the Jim Henson Company’s “Grendel” and the Andrew Garfield-fronted
“The Magic Faraway Tree,” said, “People are taking less risk generally.”
Patatian noted that one territory will now be harder to sell: “China was already a difficult market for all of us. Now I think with these tariffs, it’s going to be more complicated.”
All insiders surveyed, however, praised the strong lineup that Cannes has put together this year and are hoping overall enthusiasm fuels the market. “I truly can’t remember a Cannes with this kind of lineup that I’ve been this excited for,” Levesque said.
Bleecker Street’s Sanderson added: “I think that Cannes reasserting itself as the dominant film festival of the international cycle is great, and it just makes being on the ground there that much more exciting.”
This story first ran in the Cannes issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from that issue here.
