This is a re-edited essay I wrote as part of my UCL Film Studies Masters’.
At first thought the words Film Festival and Hollywood Blockbuster fit together as well as Michael Bay and arthouse production. However, the relationship between the two is very close. Cannes has premiered many Pixar releases, including Inside Out (2015) and UP (2010), and the last two Indiana Jones films. It has also hosted a whole panoply of other blockbusters ranging from The Matrix Reloaded (2003) to the first two Shrek films, which controversially appeared in competition (Retrospective,2024). Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, Venice hosted screenings of Dune (2021), Halloween Kills (2021), The Last Duel (2021) and Last Night in Soho (2021) (Biennale,2021). While in recent years, Toronto has screened Ford Vs Ferrari (2019) and The Martian (2015) (EW.com,2019 Indiewire,2015). The Tokyo Film Festival even hosted the world premiere of one of history’s biggest blockbusters, Titanic, in 1997 (Stringer,2013:202). Their relationship thus warrants closer inspection, especially in what it reveals regarding the economic and social underpinnings of both phenomena.
This essay will begin by outlining the apparent differences between festivals and blockbusters, as the former are often considered alternative sites of exhibition for arthouse films which can’t compete with the size of the latter. However, they are in fact highly useful to each other as Hollywood has long provided the star power festivals crave, while festivals offer access to the world’s press necessary for Hollywood to position their films as global events. Moreover, close examination reveals two key ways in which film festivals have gradually become more conducive to and reliant on blockbuster premieres. The first of these is the increasing commercialisation of independent cinema, which has resulted in the ‘indie blockbuster’, and the second is the increasing transformation of festivals into marketplaces which have prioritised their industrial prowess over their celebration of cinema.
It is impossible to definitively define a blockbuster for, as the author Christian Jungen writes, it is a ‘a non-specific description of the commercial effect of a film’ which, as Julian Stringer points out, is ‘something of a moving target’ whose meaning is contingent on its context (Jungen,2014:198, Stringer,2003:2). Therefore, the term here will be used deliberately loosely for films produced within Hollywood studio structures, by companies like Universal or Disney, whose production and marketing budgets outsize the films more commonly present at festivals. Furthermore, while analysis will primarily focus on Cannes as ‘the one festival that all other festivals look to’, with remaining attention given to Venice and Toronto, the practices and trends discussed can certainly be applied to other festivals like Sundance or the London Film Festival (Wong,2011:22).
The Alternative versus the Mainstream?
Piers Handling, the former CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), described festivals as “an alternative distribution network”, a term which has been echoed across critical writing (Turan,2002:8,Valck,2013:4,101,121, Peranson,2008:37, Wong,2011:5,129). This term “alternative” summarises the conventional understanding of festivals as an alternative to mainstream cinema, where studio products predominate and are assessed through their box office receipts. Film festivals instead, as Mark Peranson argues, nominally provide ‘opportunities to enjoy commercially inviable films’ that are valued ‘irrespective of economic gain’ (Peranson:2008,37, Valck,2014:24). This divorce between art and commerce also means festivals ascribe value instead through ‘symbolic capital’ like awards, and that films accrue this value through what Marijike de Valck calls the ‘phenomenon of value addition’, in which films gather momentum over time and through word-of-mouth. (Valck,2014:76, Valck,2014:35)
These ideas are seminal to the self-presentation of festivals, as Venice has been publicised as furthering ‘aesthetic ambition in a friendly film-festival, rather than box-office competition’,(Roos,1957:250) and Cannes’ former president and director Gilles Jacobs said part of the festival’s role was to promote ‘difficult works that wouldn’t otherwise get the attention they deserve’ (Wong:2011,1). This seeming focus on art over commerce has also positioned ‘auteurs [as its] undisputed stars’, as highlighted by the fact that festivals give their top prizes to a film’s directors rather than its producers (Wong,2011:8).
In contrast, the Hollywood model venerates the box office above all, and produces mainstream films designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience. It does not promote artistic variety, as Jungen argues, because ‘diversity is the enemy of mass entertainment’ (Jungen,2014:245). Instead, Hollywood studios pioneered monopolistic practices, including block booking, a star system, vertical integration, and extensive marketing campaigns which have coalesced into modern blockbusters (Valck,2014:88). In fact, the very origin of the blockbuster is found in the ‘artistic and economic disempowerment of author-directors’, following a slate of auteur box office failures most infamously Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980), and the move to produce films using audience tested concepts (Jungen,2014:197).
In contrast to the momentum building and word-of-mouth vital to festivals, blockbusters rely on ‘saturation releases’ which seek to dominate screens and conversation in the weeks or even days surrounding their release (Wyatt,1994:111). Indeed, the opening weekends’ importance is paramount, oftentimes acting as a ‘plebiscite on the quality of a blockbuster’ and even generating over 50% of their total box office (Jungen,2014:291,201). Thus, festivals and blockbusters seemingly have little to offer each other due to their seemingly divergent artistic and commercial aims.
Gilles Jacobs himself once even attacked Hollywood’s fixation on sequels and proven concepts when he declared in “American cinema, imagination is a sleeping beauty” (Jungen,2014:203). On their part, studio heads have demonstrated equal antipathy towards showing their films at festivals. This has included Myron Karlin, former Warner Bros chief, who feared negative critical reactions at festivals, stating “If they kill you you’re really dead”, and mega-producer Don Simpson, who described Cannes as the “kiss of death” for it “means the film is artistic” (Jungen,2014:219,205), Yet, in spite of such barbs against each other, Hollywood and film festivals have had a long intertwined history with Hollywood trading their star power for festivals’ media networks.
Festivals Run on Star Power
Festivals have always courted the spectacle and publicity which Hollywood’s presence can provide. The first Venice festival, for instance, was a star-studded event which had the full support of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America(MPPDA) (Valck,2014:24). This focus on stardom has continued ever since, as one 1956 report on the festival shows with its focus on the ‘starlets…stunts and hoopla’ and ‘flash bulbs [which] were still going off as the first images came on the screen’ (Roos,1957:245). More recent coverage has followed suit, commenting on the star-power provided by Hollywood productions, including A Star is Born (2018) and Dune (Variety,2019 Vourlias,2021).
Likewise, Cannes is often called “Hollywood’s licentious French mistress” (Valck,2014:15), and was first established as a joint French, British and American venture to oppose Mussolini’s fascist Venice event. This meant Hollywood shipped over a fleet of stars and films, including The Wizard of Oz(1939), for its inaugural event, which was eventually cancelled due to WWII (Wong,2011:132). Similarly, TIFF is often written about for its ‘bonanza of [celebrity] sightings on [its] red carpet’ (Kirkland.et.al,2011). It values stars so strongly that in 2010 a controversy erupted when long-time critics and attendees were denied passes due to “limited space…on the red carpet” (Porton,2010).
Thus, throughout their history, festivals have always utilised stars, glamour and scandals to draw attention, and these elements now define them almost as much as their films. As Robert Sklar writes, festivals are written about for their ‘hoopla’ more than their ‘cultural significance’ (Sklar,1996). Something witnessed, for example, during Cannes in 2013 where a $ 1 million Jewellery heist and fake gunshots fired at Christoph Waltz dominated headlines (Abrams,2013). Festival organisers themselves even realise this, including Jacobs, who stated, “The festival needs stars…so that gawkers…can dream….gossip magazines can get their feed…media coverage can be satisfied” (Jungen,2014:252).
Similarly, Venice’s Sal Ladestro stated that he found journalists increasingly had to “promise something about Dicaprio or Kidman” to their editors to even be allowed to attend (Frater,2007). Aspiring festivals have even purchased star influence as Rome allegedly paid Nicole Kidman to appear at its inaugural event, while Saudia Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival paid stars including Will Smith and Baz Luhrmann upwards of $1million each (Wong,2011:135,Siegel,2023).
Blockbusters Bring the Star Power
Blockbusters can help ensure a steady stream of these figures as ‘Blockbusters are [themselves] star vehicles’ who are marketed through glamourous events and publicity stunts as pre-sold elements to garner audience awareness (Jungen,2014:229). This strategy overlaps well with festivals as, in return for these stars, festivals can provide easy access to global media channels which encamp themselves at them each year. By 1999, Cannes already had 3,893 journalists and 221 TV crews, and in 2007, Toronto exceeded 1000 journalists (Turan,2002:14). This arrangement of resources is keenly aware to both sides as Jacobs stated another of Cannes’ priorities was offering the “chance to meet the world’s press…[and] generate miles of free publicity”, while Mark Canton, former CEO of Columbia Pictures, described “Cannes [as] a press junket for a global market” (Wong,2011:1, Jungen,2014:235).
Thus, invitations for blockbusters to appear at festivals largely out-of-competition and in prime opening night slots have become increasingly common and offer lucrative opportunities for blockbuster marketing blitzes. The world premiere of The Da Vinci Code(2006) as the opening film of Cannes offers a highly notable example of this as it formed part of a $4 million launch campaign. This involved a record-breaking high-speed train trip from London to Paris carrying its stars and 300 journalists and the construction of a huge pyramid for its press conference and party (Jungen,2014:299-301). The festival premiere and marketing paraphernalia established the film as a media spectacle and generated audience anticipation which pushed the film to a huge U.S. opening of $ 77 million and a worldwide total of $ 760 million (Box Office Mojo).
This strategy has been similarly followed by multiple films that have used the festival to advertise themselves and their stars before a worldwide audience. This can be witnessed through the Carlton Hotel’s famous front in Cannes, which every year hosts a different blockbuster billboard ranging from Mission Impossible (Rubin,2023) to Godzilla (1998), Armageddon (1998) and Superman (1978) (Stringer,2003:204).
However, the most carnivalesque campaign can be found in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero which involved a 23-metre inflatable model of “Arnie” being erected in Cannes’ harbour to both amusement and chagrin, and accompanied by a huge press junket where the star spoke to 20 journalists at once in 20-minute periods (Jungen,2014:237-239). The vast supply of journalists is another facet of festival appeal as it is estimated interviews can help provide up to 20% of the box-office in free advertising, and the press carried out at Cannes by Schwarzenegger for Terminator 2 (1991) was valued at around $15-20million (Jungen,2014:240).
Furthermore, beyond directly supplying publicity, a festival premiere can also help dress up a blockbuster and its surrounding discourse with a unique sheen, which can help distinguish it as something more than a simple formulaic studio offering. This is important in an increasingly crowded blockbuster environment where, in the words of Disney’s marketing chief Roger Crotti, a blockbuster must be “eventised otherwise it fails”.(Jungen,2014:284) Festivals like Cannes and Venice offer stunning backdrops, like their respective Croisette and Lido, which add glamour and old-style iconography to their films and provide dazzling images to stoke potential interest. Moreover, they also involve rites and rituals which can add a reverence and importance to a film that a usual red-carpet premiere wouldn’t (Valck,2014:37). Cannes’ red carpet is stylised as its own event under the name Montée des Marches, and its 24 steps leading up to the Salles Lumiere offer up an otherworldliness, and what Jungen calls an act of ‘canonical…consecration’ to whoever ascends them (Jungen,2014:248).
The positive impact of this association can be found in blockbusters’ subsequent press coverage and even their studios’ own reports, as Sony’s VP of domestic marketing praised The Da Vinci Code’s Cannes bow for generating a “real aura of glamour and old-fashioned showmanship” which could be packaged back to U.S. viewers (Jungen,2014:302). Similarly, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s (2008) Cannes premiere was reported as a “splashy world bow”, which helped evoke its “nostalgia factor” (McClintock.et.al,2008).
Moreover, debuting certain blockbusters at festivals has also generated coverage, which helped them break free from potential genre niches and advertise themselves more broadly. This happened most famously back with the Cannes world premiere of E.T.(1982), which Columbia Pictures originally passed on as audience testing suggested it would be seen as a “wimpy Walt Disney movie”. However, its rapturous response, which Roger Ebert recalled as his favourite ever Cannes experience, along with Steven Spielberg repeatedly citing Francois Truffaut as an influence on the film produced weightier coverage for it. Critics spoke of ‘its spectacular mise en scene’ rather than its special effects, and favourably compared the film to Star Wars as “Star Peace” (Jungen,2014:225-228). This positioned the film as a mature offering, rather than just a kids’ film, and helped it become a ‘cross-over hit’, and the then highest-ever grossing film at $792 million (Jungen,2014:228, Box Office Mojo).
This strategy has become even more prevalent, as seen in the Cannes premiere of The Great Gatsby (2013), which was described as a ‘serious blockbuster drama with big stars and a hip attitude’ positioning it for multiple demographics (The Great Gatsby,2013). Likewise, Venice helped potentially restrictive sci-fi films like Dune and Gravity (2013) become extravaganzas with huge revenues and awards consideration. Venice worked perhaps its best magic on Joker (2019) as the film appeared in competition and won the coveted Golden Lion, helping it generate huge media interest and allowing Warner Bros president of international distribution Andrew Cripps to advertise it as “the film everyone’s talking about” (Dalton,2019). This proved fruitful by turning a film, which could so easily have been deemed another exploitation of the lucrative comic book genre, into a must-see event which generated over $ 1 billion worldwide and a Best Actor Oscar for star Joaquin Phoenix (Box Office Mojo).
Thus, despite their seemingly intransigent differences blockbusters’ appearances at festivals are in fact increasingly critical for both parties, due to the publicity and media discourses they can establish. However, the relationship between them delves far deeper than this and highlights an increasing commercialisation of the festival circuit.
The Rise of ‘Indiewood’
One aspect of this festival commercialisation can be found in the “blockbusterisation” of many of the so-called independent films they host. This is something which has made festivals more conducive to and reliant on blockbuster films. The Hollywood blockbuster, as Justin Wyatt highlights, pioneered high-concept marketing which relied on ‘style and marketing hooks’ to convey ‘identifiable logo[s]’, ‘marketable concepts’, and ‘pre-sold elements’ like stars (Wyatt,1994:109,129). This, as we have seen, is highly conducive to the carnivalesque festival atmosphere and has thus become increasingly adopted by segments of independent cinema from the 1990s onwards.
This has taken the form of ‘The New Independents’ who initiated what Alisa Perren and Yannis Tzioumakis refer to as ‘indie blockbusters’ and ‘indiewood’ respectively (Perren,2001, Tzioumakis,2017:226). These films were increasingly distributed following the ‘exploitation marketing’ employed by major studios, as they relied on commercial elements like stars, and publicity stunts, rather than on the film’s individual textual quality. This strategy was inaugurated by the Weinstein’s with Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which they picked up at Sundance and then converted into an arthouse event, by foregrounding its stars Andi MacDowell and James Sapder, overhauling its marketing strategy envisioned by director Steven Soderbergh which they saw as ‘arthouse death’, and a Palme d’Or winning stop at Cannes which formed the back of the film’s ‘summer marketing blitz’ (Perren,2001:34). This strategy worked, as the film grossed $27.4 million on a $1 million budget, and sparked mimicry from films including Lost in Translation (2004), The Piano (1993), There Will Be Blood (2007) and perhaps most famously the $100 million grossing Pulp Fiction (1994) (Perren,2001:37, Tzioumakis,2017:245).
However, this reorientation to saturation releases undercut the “grassroots marketing” and ‘market-by-market platform releases’ which are central to festivals’ identity as alternative distribution networks (Tzioumakis,2017:245). This, in turn, increasingly forged them into commercial enterprises where a film’s textual value was of comparatively little value to ‘its spectacular exhibition’ (Valck,2014:19). In this way, the blockbuster’s view of festivals as sites to use ‘red-carpet[s] as a commercial intertext’ has increasingly inhabited the festivals’ own ethos (Jungen,2014:232). The recent Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness (2022) highlights this, as it was praised as an ‘arthouse blockbuster’ likely to ‘bring in audiences’ thanks to the hook of stars Woody Harrelson and Harris Dickinson and an easily marketable narrative of a luxury cruise descending into chaos (Halligan,2022).
Furthermore, this has also seen the terms “independent”, and more importantly “art” and “auteur”, shift from a means of categorisation into “strategic discourses” to be employed by publicity campaigns (Valck,2014:15). This has allowed the terms to be used more malleably, and to be co-opted by blockbusters to position themselves using festivals as must-see auteurist visions rather than economically minded output. This can be traced back again to E.T. which presented director Steven Spielberg as the film’s star, and even had him offering personal revelations about losing his virginity in a motel room for media attention, but has gained particular traction in the 21st century (Jungen,2014:227).
Directors like Baz Luhrmann and George Miller have become mainstays of Cannes premiering films, including Moulin Rouge (2001), The Great Gatsby (2013), Elvis (2022) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)and Furiosa (2024). This has helped portray them as singular artistic visions from visionary directors- it is telling both men are regularly described as such in their campaigns- rather than industrial Hollywood products (Retrospective,2023).
The tactic has been used especially effectively recently with Top Gun: Maverick. The film opened Cannes in 2022 during a lavish ceremony involving a flyover by the French Air Force, and more importantly, a masterclass by its star Tom Cruise. The session involved a career retrospective in which Cruise emphasised his constant desire “to push the art form”, and culminated in him receiving an honorary Palme d’Or, an honour usually reserved for directors (Ramachandran,2022). This generated a huge amount of press which crucially presented the film as a culmination of an acting auteur’s long-running career. This helped position it to audiences, not as the resuscitation of a 30-year-old property, but instead a legacy sequel which represented the apex of the world’s most famous action star. In other words, the film was separated from regular mainstream blockbusters and transformed into a must-see picture which eventually grossed $1.4 billion (Box Office Mojo). Thus, the blockbuster has become increasingly embedded in the fabric of festivals like Cannes, Venice or Toronto, driving the high-concept and commercially minded atmosphere that both they and the new ‘independent’ films thrive upon.
Film Festivals or ‘Frenzied Meat Markets’?
Furthermore, the spiralling costs necessary to produce and market these ‘indie blockbusters’ have prompted another aspect of festival commercialisation. That is their transformation into industrial marketplaces. These changes in independent filmmaking meant the companies driving it had to either become ‘specialty film subsidiaries’ of corporations, like Miramax, which was brought by Disney, or enter into co-financing contracts with them, which numbered 232 by 2004 (Tzioumakis,2017:225,228).
This fragmentation and corporatisation of filmmaking meant that industrial forums became indispensable to facilitate such arrangements, and festivals increasingly sought to provide them. This transformed festivals like Cannes, Venice and Toronto into what Valck aptly describes as ‘obligatory points of passage’ and essential nodes in ‘production, distribution and consumption’, on the annual film calendar (Valck,2014:36).
Festivals had long been a site for dealmaking as Cannes facilitated one to produce Star Wars in 1971 (Wong,2011:136). However, this accelerated with the officiation of the ‘Marché du cinéma’ into the Cannes festival in 1983, and the corporatisation of indie filmmaking in the 1990s (Valck,2013:133). Today, the Marché possesses its own dedicated 70,000 square-foot 28-screen building called the Espace Riviera, and, even though it still has no formal market, TIFF welcomed 3,000 industry experts in 2007 with its co-director Noah Cowan saying “the more international buyers and sellers, the better” (Valck,2013:133, Kelly,2007).
Meanwhile, Venice created an official market with the Gap-financing market in 2013, possibly spurred on by the threat of an emerging challenger in the Rome festival whose chief Teresa wanted to establish a “European Rendezvous” as one of three key global autumn marketplaces alongside Toronto and Pusan (Frater,2007). Even a self-professed and staunchly independent festival like Sundance has been criticised for being a “frenzied meat-market” for industry professionals looking to make deals and snap up new projects (Turan,2002:139). Thus, rather than an alternative network, these festivals have instead become monopolised markets whose value stems from the fact that everyone is there, allowing for what producer David Puttnam called “one stop shopping” (Turan,2002:14).
They have become what Mark Peranson calls “business” or “behemoth” festivals that do not challenge studio economics, but instead leverage it to become industrial hubs to retain their cultural currency (Peranson,2009:38). This further explains the blockbusters’ importance at festivals, as their tent-pole status ensures a stable of high-ranking executives, producers, and filmmakers will follow suit wherever they go. It is these blockbusters which allow Gilles Jacobs to state Cannes has all the “movers and shakers” of the film world, and thus that it takes the “pulse of world cinema each year” (Wong,2011:1). When Michael Moore managed to secure distribution for his controversial Fahrenheit 9/11 following its Palme d’Or victory, it was not because in his words American’s knew what “a great honour” the prize was, but rather because it garnered attention in an environment where every major distributor was present (Valck,2014:86). Today, festivals function not as alternative cultural networks, but instead inherently mainstream industrial propositions whose value is aided by the presence of blockbusters.
The seemingly irreconcilable differences between blockbusters and film festivals stem only from their self-professed aims. In fact, from the very outset festivals and Hollywood have held long relationships as they have exchanged star power for publicity and media access. The intimacy of this has only increased with the more recent commercialisation of the festival network. The rise in high-concept and highly marketed independent films, combined with the transformation of festivals into markets, has shifted festivals’ foundations from sites of cultural exchange based on inherently anti-economic principles to inherently economic projects. This has left them reliant on the industrial and normative support of major studios and their industrial output, further explaining why festivals not only invite but actively covet blockbuster films. These films have become an integral element of many of their identities.
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