Is CinemaCon, the once-sleepy industry event, the new film festival?

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Two weeks ago in Las Vegas, I witnessed the death of the film festival as we know it. Okay, that’s a mouthful of supersized hyperbole, but such was the overriding energy inside the four-day frenzy known as CinemaCon, the annual Vegas film-industry convention during which I had my festival epiphany.

Maybe it was around the time that Jack Black made his third appearance over the course of as many days. Or perhaps it was when Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya arrived on stage next to three dozen wall-climbing extras from Dune: Part Three. Was it the 10-minute freestyle rant that Moana’s Dwayne Johnson delivered in which he rhapsodized about being a proud #GirlDad? It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but all throughout the week I kept getting smacked in the face by the same loud and rude awakening: Is CinemaCon the new film festival? Or, rather, is the traditional idea of a film festival facing some kind of CinemaCon-sparked extinction?

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To briefly rewind things: For decades, the five major stops on the global festival calendar (Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto) – plus the many second-tier destinations that pepper the year (SXSW, Telluride, New York, London) – have driven the art and commerce of the medium. Yet over the past few years, the landscape has been rocked by myriad crises, some fuelled by festivals themselves, some born by factors outside of anyone’s anticipation or control.

For instance, the spectre of political debate, particularly when it involves the Middle East, has overwhelmed every single festival in one way or another over the past three years. This February’s Berlinale, for instance, will be remembered not for any of its programming – good luck to anyone who can name which film won the 2026 Golden Bear – but for how the organization nearly self-imploded over its organizers’ position, or lack of a coherent position, on the Israel-Hamas war. None of this should be surprising, given that film festivals exist, at their core, to spotlight freedom of expression. Nevertheless, almost every film festival has somehow been caught off guard and flat-footed by inevitable political discourse.

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Then there is the overriding problem of celebrity. Increasingly, the major U.S. studios – the giants that could once be reliably counted on to deliver the biggest of stars and the buzziest of awards-friendly premieres to festivals – are inching away from the festival game. Blame executives who are wary of the high costs involved in shipping armadas of talent and their entourages to various locales around the world. But many inside the studio system are also realizing that they can also no longer afford to take the more calculated risks that come with unveiling a high-profile project in front of festival audiences and critics, often far in advance of a film’s general release.

Last week, reports emerged that Warner Bros. is holding back Digger, the highly anticipated collaboration between Tom Cruise and Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, from the fall festival circuit entirely ahead of its Oct. 2 release. Why, the thinking goes, spend millions of dollars to send Cruise and company to Venice in late August when the film might then get savaged by critics a month and a half ahead of its release date, forcing the studio to then play (and pay for) heaps of damage control?

After Warner Bros. took Joker: Folie à Deux to Venice in 2024 to disastrous results, the studio has kept even its most ostensibly festival-friendly offerings far away from the likes of Cannes, Venice and Toronto. There was a reason that Paul Thomas Anderson’s eventual Oscar winner One Battle After Another didn’t play a single festival.

But you know where Warner Bros. did take Digger without a second of hesitation? It was the same place where the studio last year brought footage of One Battle After Another: CinemaCon.

Sure, the studio didn’t actually play Digger for the conference’s 4,000-plus attendees. We only got an extended trailer. But that footage, and the lively onstage appearances of Cruise and Iñárritu that prefaced it, was enough to spawn countless headlines about the project, almost all of them excitedly positive. After all, when you’re not a festival and you don’t need to show the actual film to anyone – when you only need to roll out the first phase of a gigantic marketing campaign – what else is there to write about?

This is the genius of CinemaCon, which has over the past decade evolved from its days as a sleepier, industry-centric event called ShoWest into a mainstream promotional powerhouse. For four presentation-jammed days, CinemaCon attendees are force-fed (in a loving, gentle, glitzy manner) all manner of trailers, extended first looks and behind-the-scenes sizzle reels for the biggest films of the year, often with the stars themselves stepping onstage inside Caesars Palace to upsell their wares.

Sure, TIFF and Venice and Cannes get their fair share of big names. But those festivals have to fight tooth and nail to secure top-tier talent and the attention that follows such appearances, all of which keeps the sponsors and government entities that underwrite such events happy. And now, the cracks in that stars-feed-the-system structure are starting to show.

At Cannes this year, there are only two U.S. movies in official competition for the coveted Palme d’Or, neither title from any of the five big Hollywood studios (Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony) that once valued the prestige that came with a Croisette premiere. At Berlin earlier this year, there was a notable lack of studio projects, much to the consternation of the German government that has pressed for more and more celebrities over the past few editions. At TIFF this past fall, Warner Bros. and Sony sat the action out, too, with Disney and Universal’s more independent-minded labels only dipping a toe or two into the lineup.

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It is not as if those MIA studios simply aren’t making festival-friendly films, either. Warner could have brought One Battle with Leonardo DiCaprio to anywhere it wanted. Paramount could have used TIFF’s Midnight Madness program to showcase The Running Man with Glen Powell. Universal could have trotted out the second instalment of Wicked to New York or London to juice interest. Warner Bros. could have offered, say, TIFF, an awards-season victory lap for Sinners, similar to the one they unfurled for Dunkirk in 2017. They simply chose not to.

At CinemaCon, though, studios happily flood the zone with one huge name after another. This year’s edition also offered Jason Momoa (Supergirl), Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans (Avengers: Doomsday), Tom Hanks and Tim Allen (Toy Story 5), Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock (Practical Magic 2), Michael B. Jordan (The Thomas Crown Affair), Ryan Gosling (in town for a Project Hail Mary victory lap), and enough Jack Black to last you a lifetime.

If that wasn’t enough, the industry’s most respected directors – James Cameron, Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg – were also on hand, as if the studios wanted the Colosseum stage inside Caesars to simply collapse from the collected weight of Oscar gold.

And for every glamorous studio presentation, a million headlines and social-media reactions followed, giving studios more relentlessly positive publicity than any festival could hope to offer.

Would any of the films mentioned above qualify as festival-level films? With the exception of Dune: Part Three, not really. But then again, would the Venice of today pass up the opportunity to premiere Toy Story 5 if it meant that Hanks and Allen could be photographed on the Lido? Would TIFF not invent some way to justify a screening of Doomsday if Downey Jr. and a dozen other Avengers posed along King Street West? Would New York not concoct some arbitrary legacy award to get Bullock and Kidman together for an intimate onstage conversation?

In a way, film festivals have spent the past few years embracing their own inner CinemaCons, and are now facing the messy results of that decision.

Already, I can hear the grumbles of dissent. Why should film festivals even care whether they get stars or not? Any programmer worried about studio participation can turn in their lanyard right now! And so forth. But while it is easy to declare that film fests should have no interest in showcasing overtly commercial fare – that the events should purely be the realm of artists working on the fringes or outside of the system – the hard contemporary economics of staging an event on the scale of a TIFF or New York Film Festival require a certain amount of bold-faced-name support.

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For better or worse, it is the TIFF premiere of the third Knives Out film that allows the festival to program the likes of Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf. Cannes can justify debuting the new Mission: Impossible sequel because there is a trickle-down effect that benefits Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. The scales are designed to balance out – and, for a long while, they mostly have.

Yet sitting inside CinemaCon – whose organizers have cannily increased the number of accredited press over the past few years, now making room for hordes of social-media influencers, too – I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was witnessing an industry inflection point. There is a change coming to how movies, at least the big ones whose economies drive all the rest, make their way into the world.

Film festivals won’t simply go away, of course. But they will undoubtedly face more uncomfortable challenges when it comes to marketing, to publicity and to the star power that drives so many of their more honourable efforts and endeavours. And there is only so much Jack Black to go around.