Neon CEO Tom Quinn From Cannes on Line 1...
Neon CEO Tom Quinn From Cannes on Line 1...
The Palme d'Or oracle phones in to tell me what he's seeing on the ground. Plus: Costner and Coppola play with house money
Note: As this was headed to your inbox, FX officially confirmed that there are more seasons of Shogun in the works, with a writers room currently being assembled under first season creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, and producer and consultant Hiroyuki Sanada returning. That means — as many awards season strategists have privately suspected — that the historical epic is officially moving to the drama series race at the Emmys, where it will go head-to-head with Netflix’s The Crown. I’ll have more on what all of this means in Monday’s edition, and in the meantime I’d love to hear your theories on what happens next. Email me: katey@theankler.com.
Despite what you might suspect based on the last four years, they do not tell Neon CEO Tom Quinn the Palme d’Or winner in advance.
Calling from Cannes on Wednesday afternoon, Quinn admits to engaging in the same parlor game as everyone else, speculating about how the taste of jury president Greta Gerwig and her fellow jurors — including Lily Gladstone, Omar Sy and Hirokazu Kore-eda — might affect this year’s festival winners. It’s not easy to get it right. Take, for example, Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, which Neon picked up at Cannes in 2021 before the awards were handed out. “Based on some of the reviews, we did not anticipate that it would win the Palme,” Quinn says. “I was completely shocked and surprised.”
Even for the know-it-alls who claim to be able to predict awards seasons months in advance, there are thankfully a few things that remain unknowable — and the Cannes Film Festival, now underway in the glorious South of France, may be the biggest of all. (For up-to-the-minute updates from Cannes, about the spectacle as well as the sales, make sure you’re reading Gregg Kilday’s dispatches, in partnership with Screen International.)
Quinn and his team, however, may have come closer than anyone to cracking the code. Neon has backed the last four Palme d’Or winners, having picked up Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Julia Ducornau’s Titane in the script stages and acquired Triangle and last year’s Anatomy of a Fall during the festival. Since Parasite became the first Palme winner since 1955’s Marty to win the best picture Oscar, Cannes has become an increasingly important launchpad for Oscar season — and Neon is usually right in the middle of that.
“In this era of streaming and Covid and strikes, [Cannes] still is the beacon which drives this industry,” Quinn tells me. “That has not changed for us. It’s our business plan, it’s our passion, it’s our belief.”
This year Neon is arriving at Cannes with Anora, the new film from Sean Baker, whose previous two movies — The Florida Project and Red Rocket — played at Cannes before being released by A24. Quinn calls Anora, which debuts at the festival on Tuesday, Baker’s “most accomplished and biggest film to date,” and singles out star Mikey Madison for her “huge breakout role.”
Neon is far from the only major distributor backing a film in competition — or with hopes for an eventual Oscar run down the road. With A24 and Searchlight as well as such upstarts as Mubi and Metrograph in the mix, plus two very large premieres from Warner Bros., Cannes is as likely as ever to shape the upcoming awards race — even if absolutely nobody knows what will win at the festival first.
Palme Sunday
So why boil this glamorous celebration of international cinema down to something as grubby as awards? It’s all part of the soup of Cannes, where an Iranian dissident filmmaker can debut his latest work but also the whole thing kicks off with an honorary award for Meryl Streep and a song-and-dance tribute to Greta Gerwig.
Even given Neon’s miracle run of Palme winners, Quinn and team know it’s not all about the top prize. They’ve made unlikely box-office successes of such films as Perfect Days (winner of best actor at Cannes last year for Kōji Yakusho) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (a Cannes best screenplay winner in 2019 for Céline Sciamma). Any kind of success at Cannes can lead to bigger things down the road — and, if you’re the game-playing type, maybe some bragging rights even sooner.
Since 2022, my friend Joe Reid, who writes Vulture’s Gold Rush newsletter and hosts the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, has held a Cannes Fantasy Draft, which is the best possible real-time demonstration of how hard it can be to see Cannes hits coming. Each player gets to draft four films, and points are earned based on a range of the festival’s prizes, from the Queer Palme to the actual Palme.
Even among the group of industry professionals, critics and cinephiles who take part in this draft, nobody has ever picked the eventual Palme winner in the first round of the draft. Last year Anatomy of a Fall wasn’t even picked until the draft’s final round. (Joe calls it the “Brock Purdy of Cannes,” a sports reference I absolutely had to look up.)
The draft is a silly tradition, but no sillier than watching the jury for its reaction once a film’s premiere is over, or pulling out a stopwatch to time each night’s standing ovation. There’s an irresistible collision of the sacred and the profane at Cannes every year that’s fun to watch even from afar, whether you’re betting it all on Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada making its mark (my draft tactic this year) or keeping an eye on distribution deals. (Quinn would not comment on whether they’re looking to pick up Ruben Ostlund’s latest — sorry, I tried.)
Future Prospects
So, fine, nobody knows what will win awards at Cannes — why should that stop us from speculating?
A24, Neon’s eternal rival in making international cinema cool for younger audiences, will likely also leave the festival with some pickups. It’s arriving with Parthenope, from Paolo Sorrentino, in competition, while in the Un Certain Regard category A24 also has the Zambian production On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. (My former VF colleague David Canfield called it “the most surprising thing I’ve seen at Cannes, and a winner for A24,” so I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.)
I’m intrigued to see what Mubi, which backed Fallen Leaves and Passages last awards season, does with its pre-festival pickup The Substance, in which Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore take on body horror. In Directors Fortnight, Metrograph Pictures will be presenting Good One, a delicate but powerful little film that premiered at Sundance and introduced Lily Collias as a young star to watch.
There are, of course, some other Cannes titles we’ll be able to see in theaters very soon, courtesy of some of the largest studios and most revered filmmakers on the planet. There’s Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness for Searchlight, which is playing in competition and will be released in theaters in June. But then there are also the would-be blockbusters.
For all its tiny international gems, Cannes is also the place where Jerry Seinfeld once ziplined over the red carpet in a bee costume (no Oscar nominations resulted), and fighter jets once flew over Tom Cruise’s astonished head (many, many Oscar nominations resulted). I mean, have you seen that massive Croisette red carpet? Sometimes you just gotta go big.
Blockbuster Hopes and Dreams
There’s probably no film in Cannes this year bearing as much weight of recent history as Furiosa, which premiered yesterday out of competition just over a week before its May 24 global release.
That’s the exact pattern as its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road, which dazzled Cannes the day before its release, and went on to become a box-office and awards sensation. (I’m not the only person who thinks that if just a few things had gone differently that season, Fury Road very well could have won best picture).
Gregg reports it got a “predictably rapturous reception,” and reviews range from calling it good but not as great as Mad Max: Fury Road to “one of the greatest prequels ever made.” But of course, winning over the critics wasn’t really the battle here. Many, many opinions on the future of Hollywood will be formed by how Furiosa opens next weekend, fairly or not. For now, let’s just say it’s off to a good start.
Costner vs. Coppola
Aside from roundups of best director Oscar winners, it’s hard to imagine many points in the last three decades when Kevin Costner and Francis Ford Coppola would have been assumed to have a whole lot in common. But with Costner’s Horizon: Part One and Coppola’s Megalopolis —two epic projects self-financed by their ambitious directors — both landing at Cannes, the director of The Postman and Apocalypse Now respectively, are suddenly standing shoulder-to-shoulder, representatives of what can happen when very wealthy filmmakers put their own money behind their wildest dreams.
In an interview with Deadline’s Mike Fleming, in which Costner says he doesn’t want to talk about the behind-the-scenes Yellowstone drama but keeps returning to the Yellowstone drama, he compares himself and Coppola to Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. “But,” Costner emphasizes, “our obsession isn’t such that we would take other people down. We put ourselves on the line, we shoulder it all.”
Megalopolis, set in a futuristic sort-of Manhattan and inspired by a feud from ancient Rome, will probably not be much like Horizon, a two-part Western saga that Costner eventually hopes to turn into four parts. It’s reasonable to guess that Megalopolis, which premieres in competition today, is more likely to capture the imagination of Cannes cinephiles, who have probably never watched a frame of Yellowstone but might have some nostalgic affection for Dances with Wolves.
Both Coppola and Costner have put a lot on the line, as Costner points out, and both still have something to prove; despite those best director statues, neither has directed a commercial success since the ‘90s. To me, that’s all the more reason to root for these Captain Ahabs, getting the chance to follow their dreams on the kind of massive scale that only a winery or Santa Barbara real estate allows you.
The world is full of millionaires, many of them in Hollywood, who never do a single interesting thing with their wealth. Even if Megalopolis and Horizon are met with some of those famous Cannes boos this week (as of press time, Megalopolis reviews were landing and ranging from “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen” to “tedious nonsense,”) I hope we can at least take a moment to celebrate the humongous swings.
In Other News . . .
MTV’s Movie Award Hiatus
Any Gen Xer or elder Millennial could tell you that the MTV Movie Awards aren’t what they used to be — hell, they’re not even called the same thing, having added TV to its purview in 2017.
But it’s still a little sad to read the news that the show will be sitting out 2024 entirely, with plans to return in 2025 with a “reimagined” format. Having pulled off last year’s show during the writers strike, with no host and just pre-recorded acceptance speeches, it kind of seemed like the awards could survive anything.
Is it just pure nostalgia that makes me root for an MTV Movie & TV Awards comeback? Probably. But after surviving the gauntlet of awards season proper, in which the same people gamely arrive to accept more or less the same awards, there’s a chaotic thrill in a show that will hand out awards for Best Musical Moment or Most Frightened Performance.
And if I have to tell you the value of the Best Kiss award, well clearly you haven’t watched the above clip recently enough.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Does the full Wicked trailer continue the irritating modern trend of musicals hiding the fact that they’re musicals? On one hand, you don’t actually see a single character burst into song, and aside from one shot of Ariana Grande’s Glinda twirling on a chandelier, there’s no dancing either.
On the other hand, hearing extensive clips of the songs “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” makes it clear to anyone who’s been to Broadway in the past 20 years that this is, indeed, that Wicked. The real shell game may be in the title Wicked, which gives no indication that this is merely half of the show, with the second movie set to premiere Thanksgiving 2025.