These days Venice has a more respectable reputation as the first of virtually back-to-back events that also include the Telluride Film Festival (beginning on Sept. 4), the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10), and the one I’ll eventually cover, the New York Film Festival (Sept. 25). Each has their own legacy and flavor that might be invisible to the casual observer, but they all amount to the building blocks necessary to create momentum in a campaign narrative (or collapse it in abject failure once the critics’ knives come out).
Anora, the Best Picture winner from Sean Baker in 2025, premiered in May’s storied Cannes Film Festival but then built momentum at Telluride and Toronto in September. And while last year’s winner One Battle After Another loudly skipped the fests to have a wide U.S. release like a big damn Hollywood action movie, seven of the 10 Best Picture nominees still played in the September festivals, often more than one. Bugonia and Frankenstein even had their world premieres in Venice, Hamnet in Telluride, and Marty Supreme in New York.
“I think for a filmmaker, you’ve got to just want to get into one, but there is prestige about certain ones that you want to debut and get your first eyes on you,” Clayton Davis, the chief awards editor at Variety, previously told me for Den of Geek magazine. The optics vary of course, with Toronto being seen as more populist while Venice is the most elite since there is a celebrity-dotted jury that gives out the coveted awards, and it invites a literal European sensibility comparable to Cannes. And as Davis noted, “A lot of people don’t want to blow their load at Cannes because then you have to sustain the buzz for eight, nine more months.”
Still, this year is intriguing since Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera publicly defended the lack of Hollywood studio movies at Venice, which set the tone for the rest of the Big Four. According to Barbera, none of the year’s remaining Hollywood movies deemed promising enough for Venice were ready in time for September, save Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise’s Digger, but WB “decided to release [the film] by relying on the element of surprise, bypassing all the autumn festivals.”
One might wonder if the dangers that befell Todd Phillips when the same studio brought Joker: Folie à Deux to Venice in 2024 to absolutely scathing reviews and word-of-mouth had something to do with this as well. (In Phillips’ defense, his first Joker somehow won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2019, setting the supervillain movie on a path to be a major Oscar player.)
Be that as it may, this year’s festivals already are lining up some intriguing options. Probably the buzziest film at Venice that no one’s seen yet is Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which stars Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen (Pattinson also looks pretty predatory in the trailer). Danny Boyle’s biopic about Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul behind Fox News, The Sun, and the modern day iterations of The New York Post and Wall Street Journal, is also premiering at Venice before going to TIFF. Werner Herzog’s beautifully titled Bucking Fastard, complete with both Mara sisters(!) as twins who must speak in unison is likewise going to TIFF and New York after its Venice premiere.
