At Cannes Film Festival, Everyone Is Painting Blue Boats

Cinema cannot de-risk itself into the expensive average

👋🏼 from Cannes, where cinema is being celebrated, financed, photographed, de-risked, lightly panicked over and, somewhere in the middle of all that, possibly watched. I am going on holiday soon, which is genuinely exciting, mainly because my cortisol has begun speaking to HR. But it would not be me if I left you with only the promise of rest and no fresh professional provocation.

Next up: Banff World Media Festival, the entertainment industry’s best summer camp. I’ve been asked to open the event with three questions no one wants to ask. A calm and sensible premise. Absolutely nothing to worry about.

Cannes is very good at making uncertainty look expensive.

This is, depending on your mood, either the whole charm of the place or the entire indictment. There are red carpets, impossible shoes, glorious hotel lobbies, people saying “we must catch up properly” with the spiritual intensity of a hostage note, and enough free rosé to keep several legacy media strategies alive until Q4.

It is glamorous. It is useful. It is ridiculous. It is real.

That combination is why Cannes is still interesting. The lazy version is to call it bullshit and go home. The truer version is that all industries need rituals where the bullshit performs a serious function. The Cannes Film Festival is not just where the film industry gathers to celebrate cinema, but where the industry gathers to manufacture confidence in cinema, around cinema, adjacent to cinema, and occasionally despite cinema.

The market matters. The money matters. Rights are sold. Films are financed. Territories are carved up. Producers meet buyers. Financiers meet packages. Distributors hunt for heat. Agents move human furniture around the global attention economy with the confidence of people who have never had to find their own hotel reservation.

Cannes is not fake. It is a confidence market.

And this year, the confidence felt expensive.

I kept hearing the same word in different meetings over and over and over (and over!) again: de-risk. (CH-RIST!)

De-risk the investment. De-risk the slate. De-risk the talent. De-risk the genre. De-risk the spend. De-risk the marketing. De-risk the audience. De-risk the downside. De-risk, de-risk, de-risk, until eventually one begins to wonder whether the thing being de-risked is the film or the possibility that anyone involved might have to stand behind a dangerous decision.

In one meeting, the question was not really “what is the best story to tell?” It was “what is the best way to avoid losing investors’ money?” Reasonable question. Adult question. Also, if left to become the only question, a catastrophic one.

Commercial art is a gamble.

That is not a romantic defence of chaos. It is the basic structure of the work. You are trying to make something that does not fully exist yet feel necessary to people who do not yet know they want it. The gamble is not some regrettable inefficiency to be optimised out by clever men in linen jackets. It is where the value comes from.

The problem is that the industry seems increasingly tempted by a fantasy in which the gamble survives as marketing language while the actual work gets averaged into safety.

This is what I have started calling the Blue Boat Problem.

Imagine deciding you want to become a successful commercial painter. Sensible enough. You go to Art Basel. You walk the booths. You study the market. You analyse what sells. You avoid all the finance bros who pretend to like art simply to post on TikTok they went. You discover that blue performs well. Boats also seem to do nicely. Medium-sized canvases have liquidity. Collectors want the suggestion of longing, but only at a scale that works above the console table.

So you go home and paint a blue boat on a medium-sized canvas.

Congratulations. You have reverse-engineered taste into something suitable for the corridor of a wealth manager’s second home.

Everyone would understand the category error. You did not discover taste, you averaged the residue of other people’s conviction.

And yet entertainment keeps drifting towards this logic. What genre travels? What IP has awareness? What actor reduces financing risk? What demographic over-indexes? What trailer beat performs? What comparable title justifies the spend? What territory pre-sale protects the downside? What does the data say people already liked, in a slightly different configuration, before they became tired of it?

None of these questions are stupid. Most are professionally necessary. But, the disaster begins when they become the theology.

The blue boat is what happens when nobody makes an obviously bad decision and everyone still produces something dead.

Yes, I had them made. If you’re a paid subscriber, let me know if you want one.

Film was built around concentrated taste power and distribution scarcity.

That old system was brilliant, ugly, exclusionary, lucky, abusive, visionary, narrow, occasionally miraculous and frequently deranged. Its defenders tend to remember only the miracles. Its critics tend to remember only the gatekeeping. Both are right, which is annoying, because nobody comes to Cannes dressed for structural complexity.

Truthfully, though, the old system had one function that still matters: someone had to stand behind a bet. A producer, studio, financier, distributor or tastemaker had to say: I believe this deserves to exist before the market proves it.

That belief could be wrong. It could be vain. It could be compromised by ego, access, class, sex, money, cowardice, lunch. But it was still belief before validation.

Then the internet routed around the walls.

Hollywood did not generously invite everyone to the party. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, cheap cameras, creator culture, streaming, algorithmic distribution (and that stupid fucking influencer sitting next to me as I write this trying to tell everyone on Instagram he’s at CFF) smashed holes in the fence. Making separated from permission. Distribution became abundant. Cultural legitimacy moved sideways. Audiences learned to assemble themselves without waiting for a studio to tell them where the cinema was.

This did not make taste obsolete, just far more expensive.

When supply is scarce, competence has value. When supply is infinite, competence becomes wallpaper. The question changes.

The old risk was: will audiences show up for this? The new risk is: will anyone care that this exists at all?

Those are not the same problem. The first can be attacked with distribution, marketing, timing, stars, trailers, windows and media spend. The second requires taste, authorship, emotional charge, cultural timing, danger, heat and some reason to exist beyond the fact that the finance closed.

This is where AI sharpens the knife.

In the age of generative everything, the bottom of the market fills with cheap synthetic abundance: passable images, passable scripts, passable trailers, passable concepts, passable genre sludge, passable little objects designed to look enough like entertainment to count in a dashboard. Meanwhile the top of the market becomes more valuable precisely because it is authored, specific, strange, risky, alive.

The middle is where things get ugly. The middle is expensive competence. The middle is over-managed and over-exploited IP with no pulse. The middle is the film that survived every meeting with nothing actually to say. The middle is the blue boat.

A tiny strange thing can win because it is specific. A giant event film can win because scale still has its own weather system. But the expensive average has nowhere to hide. It costs too much to be disposable and says too little to become necessary.

This is the danger Cannes reveals so beautifully.

The festival sells aura, scarcity, glamour, taste, heat, proximity and discovery. It gathers people in one place and says: look here, this matters. It tries to re-concentrate attention after the internet shattered attention into fragments.

Then, underneath all that manufactured magic, the industry asks whether the magic can be made safer.

That is the strange loop.

Cannes celebrates the gamble while the market tries to engineer the gamble out of the product.

The answer is not to become stupid about money. Nobody needs a return to cocaine-accounting cinema, where the budget is a mood board and the recoupment plan is “Europe will understand”. De-risk the structure. De-risk the financing. De-risk production chaos, legal exposure, schedule failure, marketing waste and operational vanity. Protect investors from incompetence. Please. Adults remain welcome.

But do not de-risk the pulse.

Cinema does not need a return to the old priesthood. It needs a better taste function: more plural, more accountable, less abusive, less exclusionary, but… and let’s say it all at once: still capable of conviction. The future belongs to people and organisations that can recognise value before consensus arrives, then build intelligently around that risk instead of sanding it down until it can pass through a committee unnoticed.

Cannes still matters because it manufactures care in a culture drowning in output. Cinema still matters because, at its best, it gives that care somewhere to go.

The blue boat will probably test well. It will probably finance cleanly. It will probably survive the meeting. That is exactly the problem.

The culture is already drowning in things that survived the meeting. What it needs now are things that survived someone’s taste, conviction and willingness to be wrong.