In May 2017, the Côte d’Azur saw a clash that looked like an argument over film festival rules but turned out to be the first major battle over what the word “cinema” even means in the 21st century.
The 70th Cannes Film Festival was gearing up for its anniversary. Red carpet, photographers, the Croisette in its annual state of sacred madness—everything as usual, except for one detail in the main competition lineup. Among the nineteen competing films were two produced or acquired by Netflix: “Okja” by South Korean director Bong Joon-ho—the story of a girl and her giant genetically modified pig, a parable of corporate greed made on a Hollywood budget—and “The Meyerowitz Stories” by Noah Baumbach, an intimate New York drama starring Adam Sandler and Dustin Hoffman. Both films had been made by serious directors, both deserved a place in the competition on artistic grounds. The problem was that they had been produced and distributed by a company with no movie theaters of its own—and no intention of sending them to theaters, at least not on terms the French film industry was used to.
Friction began as soon as the program was announced. French theater owners and professional organizations voiced their displeasure: a festival born to promote theatrical distribution was admitting films into its main competition that French audiences would not be able to see in a theater. The mechanics need explaining right away, because without them the whole conflict looks like a tantrum. France had—and in modified form still has—a system called chronologie des médias, literally “media chronology”: a set of rules determining how long after a theatrical release a film may appear on DVD, pay television, free-to-air TV and, later, streaming platforms. At the time of these events, the gap between a film’s theatrical release and its availability on subscription streaming was 36 months—three years. Three years! For Netflix, with its model of instant global release, that was tantamount to being told to stick the film in a freezer.
At the opening press conference, Pedro Almodóvar, president of the jury, delivered a line that instantly became the film industry’s quote of the year: he could not imagine the Palme d’Or going to a film that could not then be seen on the big screen. The tone matters, because it was quickly lost in the retellings. Almodóvar was not attacking Netflix as a corporation. He was not saying streaming was evil. He was articulating a principle that seemed self-evident to him: a Cannes competition film is a theatrical event, and if audiences are denied the chance to experience it in a theater, then the award itself loses its meaning. Essentially, he was talking about the nature of the prize, not the quality of any particular films.
The reaction within the jury itself was uneven. Will Smith, an actor and jury member that year, publicly took issue with Almodóvar, pointing out that for many people around the world—in small towns, in poor neighborhoods—streaming is the only way to see auteur cinema. Two jury members arguing at a press conference is unusual in itself; Cannes juries normally project diplomatic unity. But this question touched something deeper than etiquette. What wins me over is the honesty of both positions: Almodóvar defended the theater-going experience, Smith defended access to cinema, and neither of them was wrong.
At the screening of “Okja,” the auditorium rang with both applause and boos—the boos began before the first frame, when the Netflix logo appeared onscreen. The film was booed for where it came from, not for what it contained. By the end, the applause had prevailed, but the aftertaste remained: Cannes audiences, accustomed to judging films by their images and editing, were voting for or against a distributor’s business model for the first time.
To understand why the conflict became so acute in Cannes rather than, say, Venice or Toronto, you have to take apart the workings of chronologie des médias—the structure that has underpinned French film production for at least half a century.
France is continental Europe’s largest film market and one of the few countries where national cinema consistently competes with Hollywood output. That is the engineered result of decades of deliberate cultural policy. The system works roughly like this: movie theaters receive an exclusive distribution window during which a film cannot be sold through other formats. Box-office revenue, in turn, is partly redistributed through the CNC (National Centre for Cinema) into funds that finance the production of new films. Pay-TV channels like Canal+, which receive the film next in line, are also required to invest a percentage of their revenue in French film production. Every “window” provided money for the next generation of films. Put crudely, the French system turned time into currency: the longer a film moved through its successive windows, the more money each one generated for the industry.
Netflix crashed into that chain like an express train plowing through a commuter rail timetable. The company’s model—day-and-date release, simultaneous or near-simultaneous availability on the platform worldwide—meant that a film appeared on phone, tablet, and TV screens on the same day it could have opened in theaters. For French cinemas, this meant the loss of their exclusive window; for Canal+, it devalued their place in the chain; for the CNC, it undermined the entire redistribution mechanism. Netflix could, in theory, have released a film theatrically in France, but then it would have had to wait 36 months before putting it on its platform for French subscribers. The film would already have been available everywhere else in the world—an absurd situation in which a French Netflix customer paid for a subscription but could not watch a film available to a subscriber in Brazil or Japan.
After the turbulent 2017, the festival’s artistic director Thierry Frémaux found himself between a rock and a hard place. On one side was pressure from French theaters and unions, which saw the Cannes competition as a symbolic fortress of theatrical distribution. On the other was an understanding that auteur cinema was becoming increasingly dependent on the money of streaming platforms—and that turning away directors of Bong Joon-ho’s stature meant impoverishing the program.
The decision announced ahead of the 2018 festival was a compromise—or, more precisely, looked like one. Cannes did not impose a blanket ban on Netflix as a company. The platform’s films could still participate in parallel programs, out-of-competition screenings, and special sections. The restriction applied specifically to the main competition—the Palme d’Or: from then on, only films whose creators pledged to secure a French theatrical release would be admitted. The wording was careful, but the intended target was obvious.
In April 2018, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos gave an interview to Variety in which he announced that the company was withdrawing its films from the Cannes Film Festival. His argument was straightforward: the new rules conflicted with the global model of simultaneous releases, while French legislation made theatrical distribution impossible on terms Netflix could accept. The company did not want to sacrifice instant worldwide streaming availability for the sake of entering a competition, even the most prestigious one. Sarandos stressed that he regarded the rule as aimed specifically at Netflix, although it had been framed in formally neutral terms.
I like one detail usually lost in retellings of this story: that year, Netflix had an exceptionally strong slate of potential competition films. Alfonso Cuarón was finishing “Roma,” the Coen brothers were wrapping “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” and Paul Greengrass was completing “22 July.” All of those films ultimately went to other festivals: “Roma” triumphed at Venice, winning the Golden Lion. Cannes lost several potentially formidable contenders; Venice gained them. The redistribution of festival capital took place in a single season.
The conflict of 2017–2018 exposed a rift that had previously existed more as a theoretical possibility. The Cannes Film Festival, founded in 1946, had built its authority on several pillars: selecting the finest cinema from around the world, the theatrical premiere as ritual, and its connection to the distribution industry that would carry films from the festival to audiences in theaters. Historically, the Palme d’Or meant that a film was worth seeing—and worth seeing specifically in a movie theater, on a big screen, in the dark, among strangers. That was part of the aesthetic contract: the festival promised that the cinema it honored would be accessible in the format for which it had been made.
Netflix offered a different contract. A film available immediately, everywhere, to all subscribers—in 190 countries at once. No lines for a limited run in three Paris arthouse theaters. No waiting for a distributor to decide whether to release the film in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. The democratization of access is a powerful argument, and Will Smith voiced it precisely at the 2017 press conference.
But these two kinds of prestige proved incompatible within a single competition. Cannes’s Palme d’Or is a one-off object, its value partly rooted in exclusivity—in the fact that a film has passed through the crucible of selection and public screening in a theater. Netflix prestige lies in reach, in algorithmic recommendations, in the fact that a film will be seen by millions rather than thousands. The first kind of prestige works vertically—upward, toward expert recognition. The second works horizontally, toward the greatest possible number of eyes. And French chronologie des médias became the point where those two axes crossed and jammed against each other.
The temptation to simplify this story is great. One version goes like this: hidebound French bureaucrats and theater owners are protecting an outdated model, blocking progress. The other: predatory American streaming is destroying a European cultural ecosystem in pursuit of global monopoly. Both versions are convenient, and both are caricatures.
By 2017, the French system of windows did indeed need reform—36 months of waiting for streaming looked excessive even to many French producers. But the principle of chronology had a rational basis: it financed film production through the successive monetization of every window. France produced around 200–300 feature films a year, and a significant share of that output existed thanks to the redistribution mechanisms built into the window system. Abolishing the chronology would have meant remaking the entire economics of French cinema, not merely opening the festival door to Netflix.
Netflix, for its part, was not the only victim of the Cannes rule. Any streaming service operating on a simultaneous-release model would have faced the same problem. Amazon Studios, for example, took a different route: they agreed to theatrical releases before streaming launches and continued to participate in Cannes. In 2016, the company backed Jarmusch’s competition entry “Paterson”—Amazon held the U.S. rights—and in 2021, their “Annette” by Leos Carax opened the festival out of competition, while that same year the studio returned to the main competition. The difference between Amazon and Netflix in this context was not ideological but operational: Amazon viewed theatrical distribution as a marketing tool, Netflix as an obstacle to its model.
Later, the French system of windows was indeed reformed. In 2022, a new agreement was signed, shortening the period for subscription streaming services that invest in French film production. For platforms investing substantial sums in French content, the window was reduced to 15 months—half the previous length. The mechanism remained, but became more flexible—for the first time since the 1960s, the chronology officially acknowledged that the digital landscape had changed irreversibly.
Two years after the Cannes scandal surrounding “Okja,” Bong Joon-ho returned to the festival with “Parasite”—a film that won the Palme d’Or in 2019, and then the Oscar for Best Picture. “Parasite” received a full theatrical release around the world, including in France. It was a film made without Netflix’s involvement—and its triumph can be read as confirmation of Cannes’s position: great cinema can still make the entire journey from festival premiere through movie theaters to global recognition. But it can also be read differently: had Bong Joon-ho made “Parasite” with Netflix money, Cannes might never have seen it.
Netflix, meanwhile, did not disappear from festival life. The company redirected its major films to Venice, Toronto, and other venues where theatrical-release requirements were looser or nonexistent. Cuarón’s “Roma” won Venice’s Golden Lion and received ten Oscar nominations, including wins for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. “Marriage Story” by Noah Baumbach (the very same filmmaker whose “Meyerowitz” was at Cannes in 2017)—six Oscar nominations. Netflix proved it could earn prestige without Cannes, and Cannes proved it could exist without Netflix. Both statements are true, and both are incomplete.
The conflict left open a question neither side has managed to answer fully. Can a festival whose identity is historically tied to the movie theater consider a film a full participant in its main competition if millions of viewers around the world will see it on home screens on the day of its premiere, while a viewer in Paris or Lyon cannot buy a ticket to see it in a theater? I’ll admit I don’t know the answer—and I suspect its shape will depend not on principles, but on which film turns out to be too good not to admit into the competition, and too “streaming” to admit.