Will Neon Find Even More Movies to Buy at Cannes? And Other Burning Market Questions

With nine films already among the official selection, expect newer buyers to surprise when vying for any remaining breakout discoveries.

There’s no question — the biggest buyer at Cannes the last several years has been Neon.

Tom Quinn’s distributor has had a remarkable track record of acquiring the films that would eventually go on to win the Palme d’Or, including most recently “It Was Just an Accident” and “Anora.” It’s no secret that Neon would love to have one of its movies win the Palme d’Or for the seventh year in a row.

Neon has as good a chance of repeating as any this year, but will the distributor still buy? Neon comes to Cannes 2026 with a whopping nine films in the official selection. Six are in the main competition: “Hope,” “Sheep in a Box,” “The Unknown,” “Fjord,” “All of a Sudden,” and, announced the same it was added to the lineup, James Gray’s “Paper Tiger.” In Directors’ Fortnight, Neon has “Clarissa” and “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” and out of competition is Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Her Private Hell.” It also just pre-bought Jeff Nichols’ next film for good measure.

MUBI, Sony Pictures Classics, Bleecker Street, and Janus Films all also have various titles, which begs the question: How much more is there to go around? Only one available film in the competition slate, Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love,” is American, and considering Sachs’ biggest hit “Love Is Strange” made just $3 million at the box office, don’t expect his new one to fetch a massive payday.

“There’s always space for a bidding war and buzz, but I do think that generally people might play a little bit safer this year,” said Miranda King, VP of acquisitions at Bleecker Street. “A lot of the potentially more exciting ones might already have homes, so I think that there might not be as much of a bidding war, but there are still gems to be found.”

King said Bleecker, which has “Victorian Psycho” in Un Certain Regard, is in a position to look to the Marché du Film for pre-buys that could arrive in 2028. They’re set for 2027, and she believes that’s true for other buyers, too. But as is always the case, distributors have full slates until they don’t. If something pops, and lately something always has, buyers will pounce, including Neon. One sales agent told us Neon had a full slate before they bought this latest wave of movies, so if there’s a will there’s a way.

“In all of our calls, they’re there, and they’re keen,” another agent said of various distributors. “They’re not going to Cannes to not buy movies.”

Will Anyone Overpay Again?

After a gangbusters 2024 with “The Substance,” Mubi came into Cannes 2025 eager to make a splash, and it did so with “Sound of Falling” and a $24 million acquisition of Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love.” With just $12 million in global box office, the film’s steep underperformance seemed to affirm the consensus that $24 million was a lot even for a Jennifer Lawrence/Robert Pattinson movie.

In addition to fewer titles available, some films, like “The Man I Love” or Clio Barnard’s Directors’ Fortnight entry “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning,” play late in the festival after many industry folks have gone home. So if Sundance sales trickling in months after the fact are any indication, Cannes titles could similarly take time to close.

But Mubi is still coming to the table this year for more, as are A24, Magnolia, Focus, IFC, and Netflix, which in recent years bought “Emilia Pérez,” “May December,” “Left-Handed Girl,” and “Nouvelle Vague,” and could always extend itself. Agents we spoke with don’t believe Mubi’s misstep will be a deterrent for others, including some newcomers looking to plant their flag. (And Mubi already has North American on “Fatherland” and “Minotaur” out of the main competition, and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” in Un Certain Regard.)

What Is Cannes’ “Josephine” Moment?

Though “The Invite” bidding war dominated most of the headlines at Sundance this year, the real surprise was the sale of “Josephine” to newcomer Sumerian Pictures. The expectation in Cannes is that another newcomer will be poised to do the same.

“It’s the Wild West of people coming out of the woodwork,” a third sales agent said. “People know there’s an opportunity in this space.”

Black Bear, Magenta Light, maybe even Sumerian again could all be in play, potentially with a financier to help co-acquire something really buzzy. The first agent said the “Josephine” move was bold, but it’s still hard to know what some of these companies are capable of and if it will pay off to take a risk with a new player (Row K looked like it could’ve been that player before some serious turmoil). Very few of these buyers have streaming output deals that make these sales smoother or allow the buyers to justify a higher price tag. And while we’re not ready to claim Warner Bros.’ new label Clockwork will define the market like we thought it could for Sundance, getting in early on Sean Baker’s new film as well as the restoration of Ken Russell’s “The Devils” in Cannes Classics gives a sense of its mandates — which include more commercial types of Neon or A24 films not unlike “The Invite” or “Anora.”

“I don’t think there’s been a Cannes I’ve attended that hasn’t had one or two entrants who are looking to make a mark,” Kino Lorber’s Lisa Schwartz said. “I think that will continue, and for a distributor that has a long history, we stick to what we know, and our advantage is we have a comp over many years of what resonates and doesn’t.”

Will More Packages Actually Get Made?

It used to be that agents would announce a package with a few stars and then hope for the best. We’d see a wave of these titles prior to Cannes and then hear about only a fraction of them again. This year, ahead of the Marché du Film, there’s been a slow trickle of just a few of note. Park Chan-wook’s new movie “The Brigands of Rattlecreek” with Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, and Pedro Pascal is as top-shelf as it gets, and there’s a lot of heat around Kitty Green’s “The Spacesuit” with Vanessa Kirby and Lewis Pullman, to name a couple.

A number more will almost certainly be announced just as the market is kicking off. For at least one agency, only half of its 10-plus film slate of packages had been unveiled at time of writing. Waiting until the last minute is part of the fun. But the agents are now approaching any package they launch with a bit more care, being more cautious about having partners or financing in place and knowing the movie will get made, despite a fickle pre-sale market. And it’s just as important for buyers who want to know as early as possible a movie’s audience and the director’s vision.

“It’s also making sure that the script is not a ‘tweener.’ I think that is sometimes what happens. It becomes a dramedy, and we really need to know what the direction is,” Palisades Park Pictures CEO Tamara Birkemoe said. “They’re very interested in knowing how are they going to market this, what is the trailer going to look like? What is the one sheet? Getting in early is definitely the most important thing at this point.”

Budget remains a huge barrier for indies navigating the package market, and Yvette Zhuang, co-CEO of the newly launched international sales label Manifest Pictures, said there was a time when many packages launched were beyond the price range for anyone besides the studios or worldwide buyers. That’s changing, both from the agents who want to see their movies get greenlit and from the talent who want to see them go theatrical.

“We’re hopeful that we might be able to return to a better equilibrium, a healthier equilibrium, between projects that would go to studio or worldwide buyer and things that would come to independents,” Zhuang said.