By Amy Shepherd
For years, Cannes Film Festival has held court as the glittering centrepiece of global cinema culture. While celebrities smile and wave for peak red carpet spectacle, buyers make backroom distribution deals, and guard the gates of the industry itself. But in 2026, the tiara started to wobble.
The two dominant conversations on the Croisette this year were strikingly intertwined: Hollywood studios noticeable by their absence, and AI that is no longer hypothetical. Underneath both was a deeper reckoning with a shift that has been quietly building for some time now: a transformation in where film value – and power – resides. Because today, films are not the primary product being sold; audiences are.
The old movie pipeline was simple: make a film, market the film, sell tickets or licences for people to see it. But today’s saturated content landscape has a central economic problem: discoverability. Overwhelmed with choice, 80% of audiences follow whatever the algorithm offers. The result is a market where even strong films can disappear into the noise – a creative and investment nightmare. So what can filmmakers do when their content isn’t recommended?
The answer for many is to go direct to consumer – shift away from films as isolated cultural objects and towards audiences as durable assets. If IP or prestige no longer guarantees visibility, then it’s not enough for a project to be “good”, it also has to reliably mobilise attention. What matters is access to communities; identifiable groups of people with shared interests, loyalties, and the capacity to amplify content organically across trusted networks. In other words, it is your audience, not your story, that holds the critical value.
This isn’t a new idea – social media platforms taught corporations decades ago that audiences could be harvested, categorised, predicted, and monetised. The surveillance economy has irrevocably transformed people into datasets across all sectors. The most financially valuable companies in the world are those most effective at capturing and retaining human attention. Cinema is simply catching up to this reality.
Of course, to sell an audience you have to have one. Which requires reinventing industry structures that no longer work in filmmakers’ favour. Historically, films passed through layers of institutional validation: festivals, critics, sales agents, distributors, exhibitors all had to signal approval before a film could reach an audience. That model is under immense pressure. Influencers increasingly carry more weight than journalists; cinemas prioritise “events” over screenings; and for many political or independent films, self-distribution has shifted from alternative strategy to practical necessity. As a result, knowing exactly who your audience is, and how to reach them without intermediaries, has become one of the industry’s hottest obsessions.
The language used across Cannes Marché du Film this year, from panels to commentary to Caffé Roma conversations, revealed an emerging sense that audience aggregation matters more to the industry today than elite validation. There was a striking emphasis on curating your audience before a film is even fully greenlit – not simply having an idea of broad demographics, but defining specific communities, ensuring established followings, building direct channels of communication. Discussions repeatedly returned to how in an ultra-competitive distribution economy, projects that arrive with owned audiences have the advantage – they can bypass traditional routes and methods altogether, and innovate to commercially succeed.
The festival’s biggest deal (A24’s $17 million for “Club Kid”) epitomised this industry re-ordering. Studios have paid big sums before, but it’s a savvy bet to go all in on a social media director star with 1M+ following – that’s minimum audience, guaranteed. That, and the Marché du Film Creator Economy Summit, signalled more than anything else that the film industry is rapidly reorganising itself around one lightbulb realisation: audiences are no longer simply consumers at the end of the chain – they are the chain itself.
This is also precisely why “impact” language has migrated so aggressively into mainstream film discourse in recent times. Five years ago, when Think-Film and Marché du Film co-launched the impACT programme at Cannes, impact was still primarily perceived as something morally admirable but commercially secondary – a way for films to matter culturally after they had already found audiences through conventional systems. The rhetoric today is fundamentally different. Impact is no longer a niche activity, but a sought-after strategy for generating durable audience attachment and sustained discoverability.
Walking around Cannes this year, you could feel how far this logic shift has permeated. Buyers and financiers repeatedly used words like “essential,” “vital,” and “critical” not to describe artistic merit, but audience strategy. It’s not that the industry has become more idealistic (although, ironically, leaning into impact will ultimately make films matter more), it’s that it’s become more unstable. A project with baked-in advocacy partnerships, educational pathways, grassroots networks, or creator amplification is now often perceived as commercially safer than a standout arthouse film with no identifiable community backing.
Not that this means impact can simply be reverse-engineered as a cynical audience acquisition tool. Strong storytelling remains the engine that generates emotional issue investment in the first place, and meaningful impact will always flow best from films that resonate deeply. Without artistic integrity, impact quickly collapses into surface-level marketing buzz, or, worse, films become propaganda – content designed purely to mobilise, rather than meaningfully move people. And delivering impact well requires expertise, credibility, and trust – audiences are adept at recognising the difference between authentic, if tactical, engagement, and messaging opportunistically bolted-on for branding purposes.
The industry knows this. Leading directors and actors increasingly frame projects through the language of impact and audience resonance. Notably this Cannes, Penelope Cruz’s media gift to “The Black Ball” was to express that the film’s message of empathy and acceptance mattered more to her than her own screentime in it. And “The Netflix Effect” website launched in the Cannes media cycle marks a major expansion of the platform framing its own business model through the language and lens of impact.
For decades, the film business behaved as though distribution was primarily about moving films towards audiences. Increasingly, it now understands that the real battle is moving audiences toward films, and keeping them there. That is why impact has moved from the margins to the centre. Impact means a film’s ability to generate and sustain attention beyond traditional advertising. It means audiences who feel ownership over a project. It means communities that will advocate for it, discuss it, organise around it, and circulate it organically. It means films arriving with built-in ecosystems rather than hoping to manufacture awareness after completion. It means tangible legacy, and thus longevity. In other words, impact is now (finally!) being understood as movie business infrastructure.
Cannes this year felt like a transitional moment between two industrial eras. The new paradigm changes everything – which films get financed and why, who holds power, and even how success itself is defined. “Impact” once referred to changing culture; at Cannes 2026, it increasingly sounded like the industry’s strategy for surviving it.
