The streaming giant won’t be sending its movies to the world’s most prestigious film festival this year, for dubious reasons.
The Cannes Film Festival and Netflix are at it again. With less than a month to go before the luminaries start walking the red carpet at the world’s most prestigious film festival, the two entities have renewed a battle that started there last year. And it’s sparked arguments around the world about what really counts as cinema.
But if you find yourself confused about what Cannes and Netflix are arguing over, what it really means, and who’s right, then you’re not alone. It’s a complex, layered fight, one that’s fundamentally about differing cultures and definitions of cinema. And it’s complicated by Netflix chief Ted Sarandos’s statements, which sometimes seem calculated to obscure what’s actually going on.
Here’s what happened, what it means, and why it matters.
The Netflix-Cannes showdown was the controversy du jour in the film world last May. Two films produced and distributed by the streaming giant — Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories — were competing at the festival. Netflix planned to release those films on its streaming platform in France at the same time as it did everywhere else: June for Okja (a billboard advertisement for the film hung within sight of the Palais des Festivals, near the famous red carpet) and, after a few more festival stops, a fall release for Meyerowitz.
That infuriated the union of French theater owners, since French law calls for a 36-month waiting period between theatrical release and streaming release. Releasing the films in French theaters would mean Netflix would have to abide by that law. But Netflix wanted to release the films to streaming in France much sooner, and thus refused to release them in French theaters. Controversy ensued.
L’affaire Netflix seemed to reach a détente, or maybe just a standstill, when festival director Thierry Frémaux declared that if Netflix (or anyone else) refused to commit to theatrical release in France, their films would be barred from the main Cannes competition in the future. That meant no Netflix film could win any of the main awards at Cannes, including the Palme d’Or or the Grand Prix — both highly regarded awards in the world of cinema, though by no means harbingers of commercial success. (The former was won by the Swedish satirical drama The Square and the latter by the French drama BPM .)
With the 2018 Cannes Film Festival looming, Frémaux reiterated in an interview with Variety that the rule would stand. “We are all about cinema and we wish to have films that play in competition get released in theaters,” he told the trade publication. “That’s the model of film lovers and Netflix must respect it as well.” Frémaux said that Netflix movies were welcome in other sections of Cannes, or welcome to play out of competition (where films like last year’s eventual Oscar Best Documentary nominee Faces Places, or this year’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, play).
But that didn’t satisfy Netflix, which chose to escalate the quarrel. Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, told Variety on April 11 that they’d be pulling out of the festival completely — not just the competition, but every other section of the festival too.
Somewhat disingenuously, Sarandos said the decision to pull out was “not our decision to make,” arguing (incorrectly) that the new rule “requires a film to have distribution in France to get in, which is completely contrary to the spirit of any film festival in the world.” (The rule only required a film to plan for theatrical release in France if it wanted to compete for the festival’s main prizes.) When questioned, Sarandos said, “I don’t think there would be any reason to go out of competition. The rule was implicitly about Netflix, and Thierry made it explicitly about Netflix when he announced the rule.”
As a result, no films with Netflix distribution will play in any section at Cannes this year. That includes The Other Side of the Wind, a highly anticipated unfinished film from the late legend Orson Welles, as well as movies from directors like Alfonso Cuarón ( Gravity), Paul Greengrass ( Captain Philips), and Jeremy Saulnier ( Green Room).
Speaking to Variety after Netflix’s decision, Frémaux left open the possibility that a future compromise might still be reached. “We’re having constructive discussions with Netflix and the door is not shut,” he said. “I saw Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma several times and it’s a marvelous film and we wanted to have it in competition. As far as Orson Welles’ film The Other Side of the Wind, we were really eager to show the film out of competition. It’s a sad situation for everyone involved.”
It’s not hard to see that this move on Netflix’s part is not really about the festival’s new rule, since it still could have premiered a film out of competition. Sarandos’s refusal to treat that as a possibility shows where the real fight lies. It’s not about theatrical versus streaming distribution, or about whether it’s okay to watch a film at home instead of in a theater. It’s about Netflix asserting its view of cinema over and against Cannes’s perspective.
As I wrote from the festival last year, this conflict is really about two very different cinema cultures. There’s the French perspective, which sees cinema as a fundamentally communal experience devoted to an art that is meant to be projected onto a big screen. And then there’s the American one, which prizes choice and individual taste and looks at a movie as something that’s the same no matter the size of the screen and the viewing conditions under which you see it. It would be nice to see it in a theater, but in the American way of seeing the matter, there’s no real difference.
Implicit in this argument are differing attitudes about the rules of cultural production. France is famously prescriptive about its culture, in ways that can be baffling to Americans. This is, after all, a country in which the Académie française, a committee comprising 40 people dubbed les Immortels, officially determines what kinds of words and changes will be allowed in the French language. (Not to mention that the recipe for the ubiquitous baguette is officially encoded in French law, and your morning croissant can only be shaped straight if it’s made with 100 percent butter.)
This is all intended to safeguard French identity and culture. But it’s very different from the American perspective, which has very few rules about cultural production at all. Art and culture in America develops largely along the lines of what the market will bear — and while that can lead to plenty of innovation, it also tends to discard as “outdated” or useless forms of art that can’t sustain market viability.
In his statement about Netflix’s choice to withdraw its films from the festival, Sarandos (rather passive-aggressively, I might add) cast the decision that way. “We are choosing to be about the future of cinema,” he told Variety. “If Cannes is choosing to be stuck in the history of cinema, that’s fine.”
Setting aside Sarandos’s remarkably hubristic attempts to cast Netflix as Cinema’s Savior, this does once again make it clear that the fundamental dispute is over what “cinema” is. To Sarandos and Netflix, operating in a more American-inflected framework, “cinema” is the content they serve up, which you can watch in any manner you want as long as you pony up the money for their service. To Cannes, cinema is by definition an art that requires a particular context for exhibition, and it needs protecting to keep market forces from elbowing out the possibility for that kind of exhibition.
You can side with Netflix or Cannes in this debate, and thoughtful people fall all along that spectrum. But the issue has always been that Netflix wants Cannes to give up its definition and take on Netflix’s definition instead.
There’s a compelling case to be made that both Cannes and Netflix are in the wrong, at least a little. But when it comes to the actual argument, I’d say that Netflix is, well, wronger.
Talking to Variety, Sarandos said that Cannes “has chosen to celebrate distribution rather than the art of cinema.” By contrast, he said, Netflix is “100% about the art of cinema. And by the way, every other festival in the world is too.”
This is the crux of the matter. Sarandos is attempting to position Netflix as the guardian of cinema, which, he says, is being hamstrung by Cannes.
I could describe this as “disingenuous,” but it doesn’t really cover it. Cannes has no issue with accepting films that are produced and distributed by mostly digital companies. Amazon, for instance, had a film in competition last year — Wonderstruck — and while some purists booed it during screenings, that wasn’t much of a surprise; booing is de rigueur at Cannes.
