No Disney. No Warner. No Netflix. Hollywood's Retreat From Cannes Is Deliberate.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival opened Tuesday night on the French Riviera with the usual trappings — the red carpet outside the Palais des Festivals, the photographers on risers, Gong Li and Jane Fonda speaking from the stage during the opening ceremony. What was missing was harder to see at first: not a single film from a major Hollywood studio was competing for the Palme d’Or.

Universal. Disney. Warner Bros. Sony. Paramount. All absent from the official competition lineup for the first time since 2017. Netflix and Amazon, which have spent years building their own Cannes presence, also declined to submit films. Instead, the 22 films competing for the festival’s top prize came almost entirely from independent producers, European auteurs, and a handful of marquee American directors working outside the studio system.

Festival director Thierry Frémaux, marking his 25th year running the festival, addressed the absence with a diplomat’s care. “When Hollywood studios believe that a presence at Cannes is beneficial to them, they come,” he said. “Quantitatively, studios are producing fewer blockbusters and fewer auteur films than in the past.” He added: “I hope the studio films come back.”

That framing masked a more disruptive reality. Hollywood didn’t stumble out of Cannes this year. It chose to leave — and its reasons say something concrete about how the industry now thinks about risk, prestige, and the cultural meaning of a film event.

Fear of the Pile-On

The explanations documented by trade reporters center on a concern studios have grown increasingly explicit about: social media.

For a major release, Variety reported, the costs of sending A-list talent to the pricey Mediterranean resort town — travel, accommodation, security — can run into seven figures before marketing has done anything else. Studios now weigh that cost against a risk that has become harder to absorb. A hostile reaction from the Cannes press corps can go viral before a studio’s first press release lands. An unflattering take, once confined to a trade review, gets screenshot, shared, and amplified within hours — and can define a film in audiences’ minds before it opens domestically.

Studios have responded by preferring launches they control: TikTok campaigns managed in-house, content seeded across YouTube and Instagram before a film ever reaches a screen. A Cannes press conference is, by design, the opposite of controlled. Critics can walk out. Journalists ask uncomfortable questions. A standing ovation is one possible outcome; a chorus of withering reviews on the same afternoon is another, with nothing a studio can do to moderate either result.

The Hollywood Reporter documented how studios are now producing fewer films they describe internally as “Cannes-compliant” — prestige productions built for the festival circuit and awards season, whose slower-burn marketing depends on critical approval. The films studios are greenlighting today tend to be engineered for opening-weekend audiences, not June juries.

Industry consolidation has reinforced the retreat. Disney’s 2019 acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox reduced the number of studios capable of commissioning prestige films. With Paramount now in talks to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, the pool is set to narrow further — and with it, the number of studios willing to absorb the Cannes risk.

Who’s Still There

If the major studios have decided that prestige is no longer worth the exposure, the independent sector has reached the opposite conclusion.

The most anticipated American film in competition is “Paper Tiger,” directed by James Gray and starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller. Set in the 1980s, the crime drama follows two brothers whose pursuit of the American Dream draws them into corruption and violence at the hands of the Russian mob — reuniting Driver and Johansson for the first time since 2019’s Marriage Story, for which both earned Academy Award nominations. Neon, the independent distributor, acquired North American rights to the film. Frémaux described it as “a wonderful film, a very James Gray film, very indie” — language that signals the festival’s selection committee is actively curating for a different kind of American filmmaking than the studios currently produce.

The jury weighing the 22 competition titles is chaired by South Korean director Park Chan-wook and includes Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård, actress Ruth Negga, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes, Belgian director Laura Wandel, and screenwriter Paul Laverty. The jury’s opening press conference on Tuesday drew notice for being more direct about political and industry themes than Cannes juries typically allow themselves to be in public.

The festival also saw John Travolta making his directorial debut. And on Wednesday night, a midnight screening of the original The Fast and the Furious — Universal’s franchise celebrating its 25th anniversary — drew Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, and Meadow Walker, daughter of the late Paul Walker, to the Croisette alongside Universal chairwoman Donna Langley. The franchise has earned more than $7 billion at the worldwide box office across 11 films. Peacock announced a new Fast & Furious television series this week; the final film in the franchise is set for March 2028. The anniversary screening was exactly the kind of transaction studios are still willing to make with Cannes — spectacle and nostalgia without critical exposure.

An AI Argument the Festival Wasn’t Ready For

The competition for the Palme d’Or is not the only thing being contested at the 79th edition. A separate argument — one the industry has been having globally — arrived at the festival in the form of Steven Soderbergh’s documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview.”

The film centers on the audio recording of Lennon’s last interview, conducted hours before his assassination on December 8, 1980. Soderbergh partnered with Meta to use AI-generated video of the late Beatle for the project, turning what was an audio-only artifact into a visual film experience. The choice immediately drew criticism from French filmmakers and actors.

In February, thousands of French industry professionals signed an open letter warning that AI tools were “plundering” talent across the entertainment industry, likening the technology to a “devouring hydra.” Frémaux has publicly acknowledged the concerns. The Soderbergh film placed the festival in an uncomfortable position: Cannes has long prided itself on championing creative authorship, and now it has to grapple publicly with what authorship means when AI-generated likenesses of deceased artists appear on a competition screen.

The debate connects to a broader legal and ethical argument unfolding across the industry. Publishers and authors have sued Meta, alleging that Mark Zuckerberg personally authorized the use of 81.7 terabytes of pirated books to train its Llama AI models. OpenAI’s Sora video generation platform shut down earlier this year, ending a $1 billion partnership with Disney that had positioned AI-generated video as the next major tool in studio production. The legal and creative questions at the center of the Cannes AI debate are not settled, and the Soderbergh documentary ensures they won’t be resolved quietly on the Croisette.

What the Absence Signals

Studios and their defenders argue that the Cannes retreat doesn’t signal anything troubling about Hollywood’s appetite for ambitious filmmaking. Some of the most critically celebrated films of recent awards cycles bypassed the festival circuit entirely, going straight to theatrical release and performing well. Studios say the model works for films that don’t need festival validation to find their audience.

But Cannes is not merely a launch pad. It is a statement about what the industry is willing to defend in public — and what it isn’t. When the Academy re-signed Conan O’Brien to host the Oscars for a third consecutive year this week, it underlined the entertainment industry’s broader preference for managed, low-risk events. Cannes has historically been the counterweight: a venue for work that doesn’t ask permission from anyone.

The studios’ decision to stay home doesn’t mean that kind of filmmaking is dying. “Paper Tiger,” with its independent financing and Neon distribution, is exactly the film Cannes was built for. Park Chan-wook’s jury is watching the same 22 films the Palais has always shown — stories shaped by directors who are willing to show them in an uncontrolled room.

What’s different this year is that the major studios have made their calculation explicit. The cultural risk of a Cannes premiere now outweighs its rewards, at least in 2026. That calculation may prove temporary. Frémaux is counting on it. But it’s a meaningful statement about where Hollywood sees its interests — and how little that overlaps right now with the interests of the art form it produces.