Bonjour, Génie: It’s Your Cannes Preview!The Festival Squad Packs Its Linen—and Sweats Over Movie Tariffs
Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Antibes, May 2025 Cher Wags, Let’s begin with a vivid Cannes memory. It was June 16, 2016, and we were on the Riviera—not for the film festival (which we’ll shortly preview) but for the grandly, if misleadingly, titled Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, devoted to advertising—aka “creative communications.” In other words, storytelling with many euros attached. In those days, it was a glitzy, go-go affair: brimming with ad execs, tech futurists, and celebrities hawking artisanal gin. Facebook and Twitter were throwing beach parties. People were demoing VR headsets and speaking breathlessly about disruption. The future was bright, frictionless, and endlessly monetizable. We stepped into an elevator at the Majestic. A dazed Englishwoman stumbled in behind us. “I can’t believe what my country just did,” she whispered, looking haunted. “We just voted to destroy ourselves.” Brexit had passed that morning, and the bubble popped. That fall, of course, Donald Trump would be elected president—for the first but not the last time. The mood of disruption turned darker. The great sluice gates of globalization, flung open with techno-utopian glee, now seemed like a catastrophic mistake. The backlash came nauseatingly fast—but the billionaires emerged unscathed. Instead, ordinary people turned their fury on the neoliberal consensus and, with it, the free movement of people, ideas, and goods—the boring, imperfect, but largely functional globalism that keeps the whole world running. Now we’re all that woman in the elevator. And somebody just cut the cables. This dotty experiment has been tried before. The imperfect web of trade agreements and alliances built after World War II was designed to prevent the chaos of every-nation-for-itself disorder. Globalization, as packaged in the ’80s and ’90s, came with flaws—and had its share of smart critics on both the left and the right. But it remains vastly preferable to the incoherent tantrum now underway. The more interconnected we become, the more we seem to despise one another. Everybody knows what familiarity breeds—and it’s rarely international cooperation. But whatever Stephen Miller pins to his dream board, there’s no escaping the rest of the world. Every punch the White House throws only confirms what it won’t admit: we’re still hopelessly enmeshed. So what does this mean for Cannes—and for Hollywood? The movie business, such as it is, is irredeemably global. It’s also one of America’s most beloved exports and a formidable instrument of soft power. The president, either out of ignorance or perverse calculation, has just proposed a 100% tariff on “any and all movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands.” His stated goal: “We want movies made in America again!” We still make plenty of movies in America, among other things. And Americans already watch relatively few foreign films. But the rest of the world consumes a great many American movies—many of which (Mission: Impossible, Wicked, Gladiator II) are shot overseas. Taxing foreign films, based on the retrograde notion that other countries “steal” Hollywood ideas—as if they were, what, semiconductors?—is a Hindenburg of a policy. It would almost certainly invite retaliatory tariffs from countries like Britain, Canada, and Australia, where American blockbusters are routinely filmed. That wouldn’t bring production jobs back to Los Angeles. But it could help sink an industry that relies on global audiences to stay afloat. Maybe Trump really does want to destroy “dying” Hollywood—so he can resuscitate it in his own image (now there’s a picture). As they might say in 1937: Che cosa da Duce! Curtain down, lights out. What ails Hollywood won’t be cured by troglodyte protectionism. Escalating costs, technological shifts, and the irresistible lure of tax incentives—both at home and abroad—have all taken their toll. To survive, studios chase global receipts and cut expenses wherever they can. They’ve followed the market, with some success. What if they hadn’t? Well, there’s China, with its colossal film industry. There’s Bollywood. And there are dozens of smaller nations that have long resented American cultural dominance. In a world of closed borders, those rivals will be more than happy to fill the void. Even now, the movie business remains a mostly American creation with global reach. Its enduring power lies in the fact that it isn’t a state enterprise. Its freedoms—and yes, its excesses—are what allow it to cross borders and resonate worldwide. The effects of globalization show up both in the films that make billions and those that win prizes. The Oscars increasingly reflect what earns critical acclaim at festivals like Cannes, not what audiences (in any country) actually pay to see. There’s a widening gulf between the industry’s official tastemakers and popular taste. But that’s a creative dilemma—not one presidential fiat can fix. If activist politics haven’t been great for the box office, Trumpian interference will be worse. When Cannes kicks off its 78th edition on May 13, there’ll be no ignoring the ominous signals from across the Atlantic. But then, the festival was born of fraught geopolitics. It was created to counter Mussolini’s Venice Film Festival, and its inaugural edition in 1939 was canceled by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. After the war, Cannes became a showcase for Hollywood—and for the decadent West—in austere Cold War Europe. It has always been both a global gathering and a stage for a great American industry. Turning inward won’t rescue Hollywood. It will punish the global audience that made it matter. Yours Ever, Marcello Rubini... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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