Cannes 2023 and the Shaky Movie Business: Film Finance Beckons but AI Terrifies

The current state of the movie business was belied by the hundreds of people crowding the streets in the south of France during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. If you didn’t know better you’d think it was hurly burly, business hustle and deal-making all over the place.

But business isn’t booming, it’s still pretty darn shaky. The people swarming the Croisette are not the power players of years past, when Harvey Weinstein hosted an annual press event at the Carlton Hotel to present his upcoming films, always teasing an Oscar-worthy title or three with talent in attendance.

There’s no Harvey anymore, of course, and there are precious few independent studios that can throw their weight around. Those that exist – Neon, A24 – choose not to. And the Hollywood major studios long ago abandoned Cannes – except for the quick in-and-out for a premiere.

The stars that are here are present as much to fulfill their fashion industry contracts — by appearing on red carpets — as anything else. (See Merle Ginsberg’s column for more on that.)

The movie business has also changed dramatically over the last half-decade. The global box office is still down 30 percent compared to pre-COVID numbers in 2019. And the shrinkage may be permanent: With some notable exceptions, major markets like China have cratered for most Hollywood movies. And Russia, smaller though significant, is out of bounds due to the Ukraine war.

The business infrastructure for non-franchise or foreign films is precarious, producers told me.

“I worry for the younger generations of producers. There are fewer opportunities for up-and-coming producers,” said Sophie Mas, who alongside Natalie Portman co-founded MountainA, their production company that had the Todd Haynes film “May-December’ in competition. On a rare sunny day at the festival, we sat near the beach and talked about where quality filmmaking is going.

“It’s hard to get into the matrix of the streamers,” she continued. “If Natalie (Portman) is not part of the film… or if you don’t have a highly visible director… it’s pretty hard.”

John Sloss, the founder of Cinetic Media that arranged the sale of “May December” to Netflix (which, ironically, does not attend the festival because it’s a streamer that doesn’t play by French rules), said the festival was just getting its “sea legs” after the pandemic.

“The festival is just coming back from a traumatic interval, which was the pandemic,” he told WaxWord. “It is still very much a market for putting finance together. The real question is whether the traditional model of territorial buying, theatrical release… [which was] basically sidelined during the pandemic — will they come back and will that model of pre-selling multi-territories, rather than being greenlighted by a streamer, will it be a model that continues?”

The other problem, of course, is even when those films do get financed (since there’s no shortage of billionaires out there who want to be in the movies business), will they get distribution?

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But for those who were on the ground in Cannes, the words on everyone’s lips were: Artificial Intelligence.

What about it, I asked? “Everything,” said London-based entertainment lawyer Stephen Saltzman. “From the fear-based to curiosity over how to use it. The concern that Cannes might not exist in 19 years. The concerns over who is inventing their own movie in five minutes… Will there be no need for lawyers, creatives and lots of people who contribute to industry?”

Nobody has the answer to that yet, but Saltzman and his firm deal with these questions every day from clients scrambling to get their arms around the implications of the technology.

“People see AI coming down — it will be used to make movies, not just revise a script,” he said. “Maybe in five years you’ll ask a chatbot to create a movie with this character and you might put Tom Cruise in it — maybe not Tom Cruise, but a character who resembles him.”

Sloss, who also heard the anxiety about AI, is thinking about a more dire bigger picture. “The terror about AI has little to do with the film industry, it has to do with the future of civilization,” he said. “We’re not immune from talking about situations that affect the globe – whether global warming or AI.”

He added: “AI is on everyone’s mind because the WGA is making it a big issue [in the strike]. But it’s disproportionate to focus on the film business when the implications are so much broader for civilization.”

Good point.

The future is uncertain, it turns out, for lots of reasons.

Check out TheWrap’s Cannes magazine here and all of our Cannes 2023 coverage here.

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