Can TIFF navigate a global film industry facing a ‘turning point’?

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If it feels as if the Toronto International Film Festival is on the precipice of existential change, that’s partly because the entire industry is.

This past Monday, smack in the middle of the Venice and Telluride film festivals and three days before TIFF opens its 51st edition, more than 200 film-sector heavyweights from around the world – TIFF chief executive Cameron Bailey among them – gathered in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, for the inaugural Lumière Summit.

The confab organized by the French government was formed to address how, as France’s national film board chief Gaëtan Bruel put it, “our entire image-based civilization is at a turning point. How we create, produce, distribute, watch and pass on stories is changing profoundly, with consequences for individuals and societies alike.”

While the one-day conference opened with a serious rainfall of cash (France and South Korea pledged to jointly fund a €1-billion initiative to support the global screen sector, a pact that is open to any other country), there wasn’t much in the way of concrete answers to the most vexing issues of our moment: consolidation, artificial intelligence, cultural sovereignty. And it is just as unlikely that 11 days of TIFF will provide any tidy solutions.

But if festival organizers want TIFF to continue to have a seat at the global table, then the success of this year’s edition feels more weighted with consequence than ever before.

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It all starts, fairly or not, with TIFF’s programming – and fortunately, this year already feels like a marked improvement over the last.

With the caveat that even a festival of Toronto’s massive size and scale – 294 titles this edition, including shorts and series – cannot possibly program every buzzy title out there, TIFF’s lineup has just about everything that a demanding audience could possibly desire.

The experimental Wavelengths program has been restored to proper size after 2025’s regrettable reduction. The Canadian lineup is promising, including new work from both fresh faces and such mainstays as Michael Dowse and Sophie Deraspe. And then there are all the hotly anticipated Oscar-tipped films, including new work from Martin McDonagh (Wild Horse Nine), Jesse Eisenberg (The Debut), Danny Boyle (Ink), Chris Rock (Misty Green), Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Lee Chang-dong (Possible Love), plus almost every notable title from this past spring’s edition of Cannes – the gang’s all here, minus a Nathan Fielder movie or two.

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Yet what about the films that are not only skipping Toronto, but also bypassing every other festival? A sizable wave of ostensibly fest-flavoured titles – Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Tom Cruise vehicle Digger, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, David Fincher’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, Robert Eggers’s Werwulf, Georgia Oakley’s new version of Sense and Sensibility – are sitting out the entire circuit, from Venice through London.

We can blame increasingly cost-conscious Hollywood executives who don’t see the value in spending dump trucks’ worth of money to send celebrities to festivals when they can instead pay influencers a pittance to spread the good word. Just as studios are increasingly skittish about debuting their high-profile titles in front of unpredictable critics months before they have the chance to control the marketing narrative.

Either way, following the dearth of U.S. films from this past spring’s edition of Cannes and Warner Bros. holding its eventual Best Picture winner One Battle After Another from any festival run last fall, the festival landscape is undoubtedly shifting.

The big question is whether TIFF – which has spent the past decade building its brand around the red-carpet allure of celebrity, and not always in tandem with the quality of the films they’re presenting – will try to grasp onto something that is slipping away, or embrace an altogether new model.

Part of that answer might be found in this year’s launch of TIFF: The Market, a seven-day event running parallel to the festival that gathers buyers, sellers and creators under the roof of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Designed to fill a presumed gap in the global industry calendar between Berlin’s European Film Market in February, the Marché du Film in Cannes every May, and L.A.’s American Film Market in November, TIFF’s new initiative marks the organization’s single biggest undertaking since the opening of its Lightbox headquarters 16 years ago.

This includes $23-million in federal support, which will expire March 31, 2027, requiring the Market to be self-sufficient going forward. (Although few in Toronto or Ottawa expect that Prime Minister Mark Carney will not provide some level of renewed funding, given this timely moment for cultural sovereignty.)

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Talk to enough industry players about the market, and you’ll get the sense that most desperately want the event to succeed – they just aren’t sure how Toronto can pull it off.

For starters, the original purpose of a physical market feels rooted in the past. The era of the overnight festival bidding war, for instance, and the hot-house environment that it spawned for all levels of deal-making, is now gone, largely owing to the rise of deep-pocketed streaming giants, which come in with fat cheques for worldwide rights and quash any sense of genuine competition.

Meanwhile, the lower-scale, multiterritory negotiations that still take place between producers and distributors now stretch into months-long discussions, the dragged-out timeline making it difficult to pin success to any one single market. The back-to-school timing of TIFF also doesn’t help, given that many European and U.S. players take the summers off, and will come into Toronto without having had much time to regroup.

Finally, the industry’s biggest buyers have been flying into TIFF to conduct business on the festival’s sidelines for ages – no official convention floor or costly delegate badges or pavilions required. What incentivizes them to play into that game now, especially in this moment of belt-tightening?

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In an interview with The Globe a few weeks before opening night, Bailey said the market’s success will be measured in terms of “how many people are showing up to do business, how many delegate badges we sell, how many stands are on the floor of the convention centre, how many market screenings we’ve sold – we have about 230 market-only screenings available, and they’re nearly all gone.”

Ultimately, though, the real test for the market will be not just gauging the energy on the floor, but whether delegates leave it feeling that they received a solid return on their investment.

This includes the many emerging or mid-level Canadian producers and creators who, not having much experience with how Cannes or Berlin operate, have been sold a certain air of expectation by TIFF. And though TIFF has invited hundreds of international buyers who either haven’t been to Toronto before or stopped coming years ago – with the festival subsidizing travel and accommodation for some – will the newbies find it a useful enough experience to pay their own way going forward? The festival needs plenty of repeat customers if it hopes to grow delegate attendance from 6,000 in this first year to 12,000 by 2030.

Already, the market has claimed its first aggrieved party: the press.

With TIFF now requiring more screens to run private market showings for buyers, the number of press screenings for most of the titles in the festival itself has been limited to just one per film, whereas in the past it was typically two, allowing a certain level of flexibility for harried members of the media. Understandably, there are only so many screens available around TIFF’s King West stomping grounds. But if you want critics and reporters on your side, perhaps don’t alienate them before the festival even begins, let alone compel them to treat each screening like its own individual edition of the Hunger Games.

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Outside of the market, meanwhile, there are myriad other challenges.

Does TIFF’s marketing department genuinely want the organization’s brand to be associated with a chintzy 50/50 raffle that’s hawked throughout the festival? How about TikTok, whose short-form video platform feels anathema to the “transformative” art that the festival presumes to be championing? And by hosting AI-focused panels at the market, including one event from the leading generative-video platform Kling AI, is TIFF tacitly endorsing the slop-ified technology, which is rightly loathed by the organization’s base?

Then there are the increasingly tense geopolitics that surround international cinema, an issue that no festival has been able to swerve around. After last year’s back-and-forth debacle over the Oct. 7 documentary The Road Between Us, how will TIFF leadership approach the inevitable discourse over the politics nestled inside this year’s lineup, which includes the Israeli film Our Loves (which dramatizes the Oct. 7 attacks) alongside a handful of Palestinian films such as Thirteen in Gaza (which follows life inside a refugee camp)?

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On that front, Bailey told The Globe that “the lesson I’ve learned is that it is more important than ever to keep a space open to find films and select them based on quality and relevance to our audience, and to keep a space open for those films to be seen for their quality and their relevance – to be talked about and discussed as we’ve done for five decades.”

In terms of year-round finances, TIFF seems to be building on momentum coming out of the strike-plagued 2023 edition, when it faced a $6.6-million deficit. After ending its 2024 fiscal year with an excess of $3.1-million in revenue over expenses, the organization closed out 2025 with a surplus of $4.4-million – although a sizable portion of that was due to a 158-per-cent jump in federal funding, from $3.6-million in 2024 to $9.3-million the following year. (At the same time, TIFF saw its salary expenses rise 17 per cent, due to the launch of the Market.)

There are hopeful long-term signs, though, found in the Lightbox’s year-round box-office receipts, which are seemingly benefitting from the larger postpandemic rebound in moviegoing, especially among younger audiences.

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According to data obtained by The Globe, the Lightbox’s 2025 year-round box office, outside of the festival, came in at just more than $1.6-million, the theatre’s highest annual gross since 2018. And theatrical revenue for 2026 appears to be keeping pace so far, with top performers including Park Chan-wook’s thriller No Other Choice and Jane Schoenbrun’s meta-slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the latter of which TIFF wisely programmed alongside a mini-retrospective of the director’s work.

“Our current strategy plan, which we’re smack in the middle of, has three pillars: relevance, reach and performance,” Bailey said. “Relevance is the market piece. The reach pillar is continuing to engage a young audience and expanding things we do like the Next Wave Festival. And performance is making sure we’re working as effectively as possible within our staff, our systems, to deliver the other two pillars. And we’ve seen results.”

It is of course easy to criticize and fret about TIFF before the latest edition of the festival has opened. Just as the larger industry faces one battle after another, so, too, can everyone involved in the TIFF ecosystem come together to offer one, two, or a thousand victories.

As always, the film world is watching – here’s hoping Toronto will put on a show they’ll remember.