The 2026 Cannes film festival comes to an end with an uneasy consensus that this has very much not been a vintage year. It’s a Cannes ordinaire. There has even been some dark muttering from older veterans about comparing 2026 to the dreaded 2003 Cannes, the year of Vincent Gallo’s epically embarrassing erotic road movie The Brown Bunny. Was the Cannes cocktail missing one vital ingredient … the sparkle of Hollywood?
Well, the glitzy Hollywood films of previous years, like Mission: Impossible or Elvis, all tended to be out of competition. Their presence or absence wouldn’t make any difference to the glittering prizes at the end. But there’s no doubt about it. A really big A-lister studio picture wouldn’t have come amiss in the official selection somewhere. Are the studios really so scared of snarky Cannes reviews spoiling their big movies’ PR gameplan? Are they really petrified of Rotten Tomatoes and its fatuous and meaningless percentage score? Maybe.
