The 50th year of the Toronto International Film Festival seemed like a good time for TIFF to pull out all the stops and throw a grand celebratory anniversary party featuring world premieres of the films that will define the 2025-2026 awards season. But four days into the festival, it hasn’t worked that way.
Instead, most of the year’s hottest titles chose to premiere at other festivals, leaving TIFF to fall back on something it has always done exceptionally well: showcase crowd-pleasing movies that will entertain audiences even if they don’t impact the culture or shape the face of the upcoming season.
In a way, you could call that a disappointing turn of events for TIFF50, as this year’s signage calls it. One by one, many of what were expected to be the biggest of this year’s awards movies went to different fall festivals for their world premieres: Venice got Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” and more, while Telluride grabbed Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” Edward Berger’s “The Ballad of a Small Player” and Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”
“Frankenstein,” “Hamnet” and “Ballad of a Small Player” are also playing in Toronto, but they didn’t premiere here, which meant that TIFF lost those bragging rights in a year in which it would have been nice to land a few big fish. But something else emerged over the first few days of the festival, and in a way it speaks to what has always been a strength of a fest whose top award is determined by votes of the audience rather than a jury.
Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” which premiered on Saturday, is emblematic of this strength — Johnson’s first “Knives Out” blew the roof off of TIFF in 2019, and “Glass Onion” did the same when it premiered here in 2022. TIFF has always been a supersized festival with its eye on the non-industry audience. It wants and needs Hollywood to show up – but when filmmakers talk about what they love about Toronto, they typically start with the wildly enthusiastic crowds. And of all the Netflix movies on the festival circuit these days – “Frankenstein,” “Jay Kelly,” “A House of Dynamite,” “Train Dreams,” “Steve” and more – “Wake Up Dead Man” could well end up drawing the biggest audience.
It’s also a richly satisfying crowd-pleaser that fits perfectly in the TIFF sweet spot. And on Saturday, it held court in the Princess of Wales Theatre while the nearby Roy Thomson Hall showcased Derek Cianfrance’s “Roofman,” in which the often-dour director turned a tale of a serial robber into a real rom-com of sorts. In between those two venues, meanwhile, the Royal Alexandra Theatre hosted the world premiere of actress-turned-director Maude Apatow’s college comedy “Poetic License.” And later in the evening, Aziz Ansari premiered his “Good Fortune,” which turned out to be much gentler and smarter than you might expect given its potential for broad stoner comedy. (Think of it as “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Ansari and Seth Rogen as dueling George Baileys and Keanu Reeves as a deadpan but very funny angel Clarence.)
You can throw in Jonathan Etzler’s “Bad Apples” (Saoirse Ronan as a teacher who snaps), “Charlie Harper” (a touching post-rom-com) and even Baz Luhrmann’s “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” which had ’em dancing in the aisles, and Paul Greengrass’ “The Lost Bus,” a harrowing action film about devastating California wildfires, which seems designed more to capture viewers (who burst into a hefty round of applause at one particularly intense moment) than to impress voters.
And as usual, Toronto is lots more than what plays in its top few theaters on the opening weekend. There have been plenty of documentaries, from hard-hitting to entertaining, and lots of weightier films that have come here after premiering in Cannes, Venice and Telluride. “Hamnet” arrived in Toronto on Sunday afternoon and “Frankenstein” will be here on Monday, so two of the real faces of awards season are accounted for. And once the People’s Choice Award is announced at the end of the 11-day festival, recent history says that it will go on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture; every winner between 2012 and 2023 did just that, though last year’s winner, “The Life of Chuck,” seems likely to break the streak.
In the meantime, we’ve got another week to go in this year’s fest. A slate of audience movies may not be what the TIFF team envisioned for their 50th edition, but it’s certainly an appropriate way to acknowledge that popcorn movies are at least as important as prestige movies at this festival.
