Netflix Will Not Bring Any Movies To The Cannes Film Festival This Year

Netflix has made good on its threats. The streaming giant announced that it will be not be going to the Cannes Film Festival this year.

The order of events leading up to Netflix’s decision is as follows:

Netflix brought two of its films to Cannes last year, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories. Both were entered for competitive slots. The French film industry didn’t like this, because the rules of competition at Cannes state that movies entered must not appear on streaming services until 36 months after their theatrical debuts, a stipulation Netflix films obviously violate.

Ahead of this year’s festival, Cannes cracked down. It banned Netflix from eligibility for any awards, such as the Palme D’Or, though still allowed the streaming service to enter in “out of competition” slots. In response, Netflix threatened to boycott the festival, which starts on May 8. Now here we are.

Netflix made known that it would be avoiding Cannes just ahead of Cannes director Theirry Fremaux’s announcement of the festival’s film slate, which will take place tomorrow. The streamer was expected to have several films in that lineup, including Hold the Dark

from director Jeremy Saulnier, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, and the recently finished version of Orson Welles’s 1970s movie, The Other Side of the Wind, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Around 50 movies premiered on Netflix instead of theaters last year, wrote The New York Times, though some were released in theaters concurrently with their debuts on the streaming service (like Okja). Netflix films like Mudbound, which also got a limited theatrical release, ended up with Oscar nominations in spite of the Academy debating whether or not Netflix films counted as films. Steven Spielberg, for one, still doesn’t think they do.

Meanwhile, Netflix plans to spend around $8 billion on original content this year. With other streaming services like Hulu getting big producers on board like Get Out’s Jason Blum and tech companies like Apple spending more money on original video content, maybe we’ll see a new, streaming-focused Cannes alternative in the years to come.