When the Screen Actors Guild declared its strike, the heads of top film festivals joined an emergency Zoom call to discuss how to promote movies without the aid of stars.
The same Friday in mid-July that the Screen Actors Guild declared its strike, the heads of some of the biggest film festivals of fall 2023 jumped on an emergency Zoom call.
"Immediately we were in a panic because nobody knew what could happen, really," said Barbera, who was suddenly getting ghosted by studios and production companies whose movies had already RSVP'd to premiere at Venice. Other festivals were experiencing the same, at a time when they were just getting back on their feet from the pandemic, which shut many festivals down for a year. It was like a set of girlfriends gathering at a bar and finding out they had all recently been dumped.
The worrying matter, though, is what happens to those crowds if the strike is still going on in September. Every best-picture winner since 2008's "No Country For Old Men" has debuted at a film festival, and most of them at fall festivals.
But Venice was also the first to experience a strike-related casualty, when Luca Guadagnino's "Challengers," a tennis-world love triangle starring Zendaya that was slated to be the opening film, pushed its release date to April 2024 and withdrew from the festival - against the wishes of Guadagnino, who "fought like a lion" against the change, says Barbera. "Amazon, MGM and Warner Bros.
The equally star-oriented Toronto International Film Festival is in the same boat as Venice, but at a far larger scale. When the strike hit, they lost only three or four feature films out of their massive lineup of 220, says TIFF's artistic director, Cameron Bailey, and last week they announced they'll open with the highly anticipated "The Boy and the Heron," from Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki.
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