The Cannes Film Festival opened under a grey sky and beneath an image that felt almost too precise. This year’s official poster returned to “Thelma & Louise”: Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Ridley Scott’s 1991 film, looking free, defiant and doomed all at once.
The choice was more than nostalgic decoration. Cannes is once again honouring old Hollywood at a moment when the new big-studio Hollywood is barely visible in the official selection. Even in the relative absence of major American studios, the festival continues to think through their myths, faces and ghosts.
The opening days were unusually restrained. There was little of the industrial thunder that studio premieres, global franchises and red-carpet superstars can bring to the Croisette. This time, Cannes began less with a bang than with a revealing pause.
Daycom’s earlier analysis suggests that this quiet start is the most telling part of the festival so far. It does not point to Cannes’s weakness, but to a changed balance in the film industry: major studios need the risks of festivals less often, while festivals increasingly look for American cinema beyond traditional Hollywood.
The one loud gesture toward mass American culture came with the anniversary screening of “The Fast and the Furious.” Vin Diesel’s appearance brought back the sound of engines, the glow of early-2000s franchise cinema and a simple reminder: Hollywood brands still possess an energy that many competition premieres cannot match.
Yet that moment only sharpened the contrast. “Fast and Furious” at Cannes felt less like a glimpse of the future than a museum piece with commercial voltage still running through it. The festival was not displaying new studio ambition, but affection for an era when even genre cinema could become a shared language for fans, critics and mass audiences.
There are no big studio films in the main competition. That is not an accident, and not only a matter of curatorial taste. The studios have long treated Cannes with caution: it can bring prestige, but also boos, early critical damage and reputational risk before a film has had a normal commercial life.
For a Hollywood increasingly built around blockbusters, superhero cycles, reboots and familiar brands, Cannes is not always a comfortable stage. The festival asks for more than budget and stars. It asks for authorial risk. And risk is precisely the resource major studios now spend with growing caution.
That does not mean American cinema has disappeared. It has changed address. It is now carried by independent companies, directors with festival histories and distributors capable of connecting art-house cinema with global awards campaigns. Neon is the clearest example, having turned Palme d’Or victories into international prestige and Oscar momentum.
Neon’s presence this year looks like a sign of a new kind of American influence. This is not the old studio machine arriving in France with a ready-made demonstration of power. It is a more flexible system, working through filmmakers, festival expectation, international sales and the long runway toward awards season.
That is why James Gray’s arrival with “Paper Tiger” matters. Gray has long been a director Cannes understands better than the broad American marketplace does. His repeated presence in the main competition shows not only the festival’s loyalty to a particular auteur, but also its continued search in the United States for individual voices rather than factory output.
“Paper Tiger” returns Gray to 1980s New York, to family drama, criminal tension and moral uncertainty. A cast led by Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller gives the film star power, but its real interest lies beyond the red carpet — in the way American memory becomes cinematic form.
Another American charge comes from Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” The film is loud, bodily, ironic and playful: a comedy about slashers, identity, movie fetishes and the freedom to handle genre without reverence. It is not big Hollywood, but it is proof that American imagination is not reducible to franchises.
What matters in Schoenbrun’s film is not only its game with horror conventions, but the way it speaks about bodies, fear, desire and the possibility of remaking old forms. It does not try to flatter classical Cannes taste. It brings a different energy — more anxious, chaotic and generational.
Against these American presences, European and Asian auteur cinema feels fully at home. Koji Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” offers a quiet Japanese drama about the emotionally complex reunion of former relatives, where feeling moves through pauses rather than explosions. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s French drama “A Woman’s Life” also operates in a lower register, examining a woman’s life not defined by children or romantic attachment.
Such films are a reminder that Cannes has always been more than a showcase for world cinema. It is also a protective structure for French and European film culture. The festival resists Hollywood dominance not by refusing America outright, but by preserving a space where other tempos, languages and scales remain visible.
The first major competition statement came from Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland.” His black-and-white film about Thomas Mann’s return to ruined postwar Germany appears to be a precise, restrained work about memory, guilt and the silence after catastrophe. Its power lies not in historical declaration, but in the tension between faces, space and what remains unsaid.
In this context, the absence of studio giants becomes more than a statistic. It raises the question of what Hollywood now is. Old Hollywood was a system of genre variety: westerns, melodramas, comedies, war films, noir and auteur projects inside the studio machine. Contemporary Hollywood is split between mega-budget blockbusters and everything else.
Cannes has learned to live with that divide. It can salute “Thelma & Louise,” screen an anniversary “Fast and Furious,” launch new independent American cinema and sustain directors who work outside the logic of box-office fear. There is no contradiction in this. It is the current condition of cinema.
Under Park Chan-wook’s jury presidency, Cannes will be judging not only individual films, but competing ideas of cinema’s future. Does it belong to studios increasingly fluent in the language of safe brands? To independent companies that have captured festival initiative? Or to filmmakers who still believe form matters as much as market?
The most interesting thing about this year’s Cannes is that the answer is not yet clear. The festival has opened without a major shock, but with an important symptom. Hollywood has not vanished from Cannes. It has become a ghost, an archive, a commercial memory and a measure of what world cinema does not want to lose.
Cannes has always known how to sell the past as part of the future. In 2026, that skill feels especially visible. Old stars, old films and old myths are not merely decorating the façade. They remind us that cinema survives not by repeating Hollywood, but by speaking with its shadow — and daring to move beyond it.
