The workers put it up on a Sunday, two days before anything began. A massive image of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis — wind in their hair, smiles like they’ve just decided something — plastered across the front of the Palais des Festivals. Thelma & Louise. The official poster of the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
By Tuesday night, the choice looked less like nostalgia and more like a dare.
It was jury member Paul Laverty who made the connection explicit, though he didn’t need to try very hard. As the opening-day press conference was winding down, the Scottish screenwriter — the pen behind Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winners The Wind That Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake — gestured toward the poster and asked the room a question that wasn’t really a question: “Isn’t it fascinating to see some of them like Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo blacklisted because of their views in opposing the murder of women and children in Gaza?” He quoted King Lear. “Madmen lead the blind.” Then he sat down.
Silence. Then the press conference ended.
That’s the thing about Cannes Day One in 2026: the ceremony was muted, the opening film was a dud, Hollywood showed up with a noticeably thin bench — and yet the day generated more actual heat than most opening nights in recent memory. Not the heat of spectacle. The heat of things that have been smoldering finally catching some air.
The 79th festival opened with politics, artificial intelligence and the shifting priorities of Hollywood taking center stage — which sounds like a press release, until you realize that all three of those things kept colliding into each other in ways nobody had quite scripted.
Start with Peter Jackson. He walked the red carpet alongside a smattering of celebrities that made their way to Cannes — from Diego Luna to Emily in Paris star Lucas Bravo to Tyrese Gibson — and a jury that includes Demi Moore, Chloé Zhao, Ruth Negga, Stellan Skarsgård, and Park Chan-wook. Jackson was there to receive an honorary Palme d’Or, presented by Elijah Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the films and who told the Palais: “You showed the world something it had never seen before, and nothing was ever the same. He helped build an entirely new filmmaking culture at the far edge of the world.”
Jackson was visibly moved. He recalled bringing twenty minutes of raw footage to Cannes in 2001, when the press was calling the Lord of the Rings shoot a folly and predicting financial ruin. “That gamble changed the perception of the film. By the time Fellowship of the Ring came out in December, there was an anticipation that wouldn’t have happened unless it was for Cannes.”
It was a warm moment in an otherwise prickly evening. But it also quietly underscored something: the kind of swinging, eccentric, go-for-broke filmmaking that Jackson did in New Zealand — leveraging new technology in the service of a vision so personal it made studios nervous — is exactly what’s under threat now. The chatter around the Croisette felt unusually charged this year. Hollywood is in flux, studios are pulling back from splurging at festivals, A.I. looms over creative jobs, wars are raging in different corners of the world, and fears over hantavirus are mounting.
It was Guillermo del Toro who said the quiet part loudest, and he said it with his whole chest.
He wasn’t in competition. He came to Cannes with a 4K restoration of Pan’s Labyrinth, twenty years after the film earned a 22-minute standing ovation at this same festival — still the longest in Cannes history. Del Toro reflected on some of the struggles he experienced making it. “Twenty years ago, making this movie was like going against everything at all times,” he said. “It was the second worst filmmaking experience of my life, the first one being ‘Mimic’ with the Weinsteins. That was horrible. No one wanted to finance it, and in production we had everything that could go wrong, go wrong.”
That would have been enough of a story. But then he kept going.
“We are, unfortunately, in times that make this movie more pertinent than ever because they tell us everything is useless to resist, that art can be done with a fucking app and we are facing things so formidable. But I feel and I think, like the girl Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, if we can just leave a mark, if we can put our faith against our faith and our strength against our strength, there is hope.”
Art can be done with a fucking app. The crowd laughed, but not the way people laugh when something is funny. The way people laugh when someone says the thing they’ve been trying not to think about.
A few hours earlier, in the jury press conference, Demi Moore had taken a more diplomatic line on the same subject — she acknowledged that the industry probably hasn’t protected itself adequately from AI but argued that filmmakers should find ways to work with it rather than simply resist. Two Oscar winners, two completely different postures. Neither of them wrong, exactly. Both of them aware that the ground has shifted.
The opening film itself was, by most accounts, a gentle disaster.
Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss — a period romantic comedy set in 1920s carnival France, featuring a fake psychic, a grieving painter, and a lot of elaborate con artistry — was chosen to open the festival, presumably because it seemed like a crowd-pleaser, the kind of breezy entertainment that puts people in a good mood before twelve days of heavy cinema. It wants to be a romp and a deadly serious movie, a lofty meditation on love and art and illusion that is also as lusciously stylized as old Hollywood corn. Maybe that’s why it was chosen as the opening-night film at Cannes: it seemed like an entertainment that might have something for everyone. But it is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its own conceits.
Variety called it “a thud.” The Hollywood Reporter said the power was out. Even more sympathetic reviews acknowledged the thing was clunky. And yet, in a strange way, even the failure of the opening film fit the evening’s theme: here was a movie about a woman who performs fake electricity, taking shocks on a carnival stage for a pittance, pretending to channel the dead for an audience that wants to believe. Magic that isn’t. Spectacle over substance. An illusion the audience consents to because the alternative — engaging with what’s real — is too uncomfortable.
You could read too much into that. But this is Cannes.
The task of declaring the festival officially open fell to the 88-year-old Jane Fonda and Gong Li. Two women of an era when the industry had very specific ideas about what they were allowed to do and say, who outlasted all of it. Fonda showed up in a shimmering black dress and a bejeweled necklace — movie glamour in the old, unironic sense — and the flashbulbs went haywire.
Outside, more than 300 filmmakers had signed an open letter condemning the industry’s silence on Gaza, including Juliette Binoche, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, and Pedro Pascal. The political debate never overtook the discussion about the films. Cannes has a way of absorbing the shock without losing control — unlike Berlin’s festival earlier this year, which nearly came apart at the seams. But you felt the pressure of it. The way you feel the pressure of something being held in.
Salma Abu Ayyash of the Palestinian Film Institute drew a sharp distinction between Berlin, where she says Palestinian directors and their supporters “felt threatened,” and Cannes, where “we feel very safe and very appreciated.” That’s something. It’s not enough, and nobody at the festival claimed it was. But it’s something.
James Franco appeared, unexpectedly, in the lobby of the Palais between the ceremony and the screening. His career was derailed years ago by allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior. He was mobbed by fans, took selfies, then ducked into the outdoor smoking patio where Diego Luna grabbed his arm. Cannes, historically, has a complicated relationship with rehabilitation. It tends toward forgiveness, or at least toward a studied indifference to American moral accounting. Whether that’s sophistication or moral laziness depends on who you ask and when.
Nobody mentioned it on stage. Everyone noticed.
Here’s what you keep coming back to: the poster.
Thelma & Louise ends the way it ends — not with rescue, not with justice, but with a choice made on their own terms, over a cliff, into the light. Ridley Scott’s film was the closing entry at the 44th Cannes Film Festival, back in 1991. Thirty-five years later, the festival chose those two faces to represent itself to the world. Two women on the run. Two women who found, in escaping one thing, that they’d become something else entirely.
On the same day that Paul Laverty named Susan Sarandon from the stage, pointing at that poster while calling out Hollywood for punishing people who speak. On the same day that del Toro stood in a darkened theater and said: never give to fear. On the same day that an 88-year-old Jane Fonda opened the whole thing with her hand on the lever.
The festival had no idea it was this on-the-nose, or maybe it did. Maybe Thierry Frémaux, in his 25th year running this thing, understood that the image he chose would mean something different by the time the ceremony arrived. That Cannes in 2026 would feel less like a celebration and more like an act of defiance. Art made anyway, in the middle of everything.
The poster knew something.
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