The (Extra Hot) Cannes Hot List: Nic Cage, Kristen Stewart and Paul Rudd Films to Heat up the Market:

The Cannes Film Festival is bracing for what could be its most disruptive edition in decades, with freelance festival employees threatening strike action that could derail the opening night ceremony, and the entire French industry on tenterhooks ahead of an expected new wave of #MeToo allegations against some of the country’s biggest stars, including a few with films in competition this year.

Well, at least the market looks promising. Judging by the number and quality of projects pitching at the 2024 Cannes film market (May 14-22), this could be a banner year for the Marché du Film.

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“The pre-sales market is back in a big way,” notes Janina Vilsmaier, senior vp of sales and distribution at Protagonist Pictures, whose Cannes slate includes Simon Curtis’ best-agers comedy Encore starring Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Henry Winkler, and Don Johnson, and Jimpa, the upcoming feature from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande director Sophie Hyde about a trans non-binary teenager visiting their gay grandfather, and starring Olivia Colman and John Lithgow. “International buyers really want to plan their slates and are buying for 2025 and 2026, looking to lock in films before the studios or streamers come in to snatch them up,” says Vilsmaier.

Global distributors will have a lot to pick from this year. Alongside the truly big swings — Kevin Costner’s western epic Horizon: An American Saga and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis which sold in key European territories ahead of its Cannes premiere — there is a healthy diet of action flicks (Vin Diesel’s Riddick: Furya from Rocket Science, A Higher Standard’s Head Games with Samuel L. Jackson and Henry Golding), mainstream dramas like John Lee Hancock’s Monsanto and Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky (CAA Media Finance and FilmNation, respectively), and arthouse/genre cross over like the Kristen Stewart/Oscar Isaac vampire flick Flesh of the Gods from XYZ Films or Julia Ducournau’s Titane follow-up Alpha.

The still-hungry international market is a welcome change from the U.S., where securing a sale remains a challenge for indie features (the list of still-unsold festival hits is a long one). “Aside from Lionsgate, there’s almost no one [in the U.S.] who wants to buy a mainstream or genre-focused indie film,” laments one international sales exec.

As for what the domestic distributors do want, the big sellers out of Sundance were uplifting comedies and documentaries, like My Old Ass landing at Amazon MGM for $15 million and the Will Ferrell road trip doc Will & Harper landing at Netflix in a reported record-breaking deal. “For buyers that have a backbone, this is the moment to take chances. If we keep giving people the same thing, at some point, there’s going to be another pendulum swing with people saying, ‘Okay, enough of the happy endings,’” says Christine D’Souza Gelb of Past Lives producer 2AM, which handles indie sales, working across financiers and studios.

View this article to get a full look at the top titles — in what is shaping up to be one of Cannes’ buzziest markets in years — at The Hollywood Reporter.