Are Oscar Contenders Avoiding the Venice Film Festival?

Before the line-up for the 2026 Venice Film Festival was revealed, there was much frenzied speculation about what might show up on it. Would Alejandro González Iñárritu’s breathlessly awaited, Tom Cruise vehicle Digger be sailing to the Lido? What about Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning? Or David Fincher’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood spin-off, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, with Brad Pitt; Tom Ford’s long-anticipated Cry to Heaven; Tony Gilroy’s awards hopeful Behemoth!; or Fernando Meirelles’s Denzel Washington-fronted Netflix thriller Here Comes the Flood? Or, indeed, Jesse Eisenberg’s Julianne Moore-led The Debut; Simon Stone’s Elsinore with Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman; Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter with Kit Connor; CODA director Siân Heder’s Being Heumann; Joel Coen’s Jack of Spades with Josh O’Connor; or Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, potentially the legend’s last-ever movie?

Turns out, they were all missing from the roster. A number of splashy awards contenders will be at Venice: Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell; Florian Zeller’s Bunker, centered on Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard with Kate and Rooney Mara; and Lance Oppenheim’s Robert Pattinson-led Primetime. But where were the other Oscar-bound titles?

The answer is complicated. A few films (The Social Reckoning, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, Cry to Heaven, Jack of Spades) just don’t seem to be ready yet, which is unfortunate timing for Venice. Others, though, have chosen to premiere at rival autumn film festivals instead—the New York Film Festival (Behemoth!), Toronto (The Debut, Being Heumann) and Telluride (the festival’s line-up isn’t announced in advance, but Elsinore, Tender Loving Care, and A Long Winter are all rumored to be screening there). And some (most notably Digger) appear to be avoiding the festival circuit altogether.

The appeal of choosing a different festival is clear. Yes, Venice provides a glamorous, high-profile red carpet, a heady dose of prestige with its long and glittering history, and a Golden Lion win can sometimes pave the way to a best-picture Oscar. (That was the case, not too long ago, for both Nomadland and The Shape of Water.) But it also brings risk: as with Cannes, Venice hosts more European and global film critics than its North American equivalents, and they have a reputation for being more critical—more prone to booing and publishing scathing reviews—than their peers in Telluride, Toronto, or New York.

Just last year, a number of the biggest films that debuted at Venice (Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, with Julia Roberts; Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, with the Rock; Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, with George Clooney; Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite) were declared dead on arrival, with many commentators speculating that they’d have had longer awards-season shelf lives had they premiered elsewhere. (Frankenstein and Bugonia were the only two films at Venice that ultimately got best-picture nods, though both received their fair share of negative reviews too.) Meanwhile, a film like Hamnet, which debuted at Telluride, clearly benefited from the intimacy that industry-insider-dominated setting provides—it immediately earned raves and cemented its place in the Oscar race. Criticism came later, but affected it less; had it premiered at Venice, it may well have proved more divisive from the off.

The Toronto and New York Film Festivals, in turn, feel more accessible to the general public and are, on the whole, like Telluride, friendlier places to land new releases. Marty Supreme, for instance, was warmly received at its New York Film Festival premiere and ended up with nine Oscar nominations. (Again, criticism came later.) And Toronto’s People’s Choice Award has long been a best-picture bellwether—Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire et al have all scooped both. So a Toronto debut can massively boost a movie—but if it bombs, it doesn’t feel as seismic as a major Venice flop.

And then there is, of course, the option to swerve all of that entirely. The two most successful films from this year’s awards season, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, both eschewed festivals and still managed to become box-office hits and critical successes. It’s proof that a different path is possible, sometimes even preferable.

On the flip side, a movie like Joker: Folie à Deux, the Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix-fronted sequel to Todd Phillips’s double Oscar-winning, Golden Lion recipient Joker, would have had a baked-in audience had it gone straight to theaters. But it went to Venice first, was torn to shreds by critics, and found itself subsequently ignored by awards bodies and losing millions when it did open. Is it a surprise, then, that Digger (which, like Folie à Deux, is produced by Warner Brothers) would skip Venice? Given this new film features a transformative, potentially awards-worthy performance from the eternally bankable Tom Cruise, why wager its success—monetary, critical, and otherwise—on a roll of the dice on the Lido? It’s a film that just doesn’t need that platform.

As a result, the films that will be at Venice this year, and are likely to keep coming to the festival in the years to come, are those which that a more indie sensibility and decidedly less to lose, rather than guaranteed moneymakers that were themselves expensive to finance; more experimental, off-the-wall work that will benefit from the attention Venice can bring it, regardless of the tenor of reviews.

In fairness, Cannes is in the same boat—back in the spring, there were zero Hollywood studio movies on the Croisette, with headline-grabbing bombs like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023 acting as a reminder of the potential perils of bringing a blockbuster to the festival. Still, this time around, the lack of behemoths sucking up all the oxygen meant more breathing room for smaller and more international releases, including Cristian Mungiu’s eventual Palme d’Or winner Fjord and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix-winning Minotaur. It’s likely that both films will show up in the Oscar race come 2027.

Venice, too, in the absence of bigger, noisier movies, has been catapulting smaller releases that might otherwise have been overlooked onto the global stage. Last year, for instance, a line-up light on studio fare saw the second-place Grand Jury prize awarded to Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. Months later, it went on to get a best-international-feature Oscar nomination.

So, even if the studios choose to keep their (seemingly) guaranteed awards contenders from Venice, the festival still has the power—the clout, the spotlight, the high-profile awards—to turn worthy indies into verified Oscar power-players. And doesn’t that make for a much more exciting cinematic landscape? Some films will be seen anyway—the job of a festival is, surely, to lift up those which might not.