Cannes Marché du Film 2026: AI and the Creator Economy

Cannes is no longer simply chasing the future of cinema: it is trying to give it a badge, a stage and a business model. The Marché du Film 2026, scheduled from May 12 to 20, with the Festival continuing until May 23, has chosen to openly strengthen its most “innovation-centric” line: the AI for Talent Summit returns, the Creator Economy Summit makes its debut, the Village Innovation grows, the immersive side expands, and the entire online system is brought back inside the new Cinando ecosystem.

Cannes 2026 bets on AI and the creator economy

The real news is that Cannes is no longer treating artificial intelligence as a side issue, something for a technical conference or a panel for futurists with laminated passes. The AI for Talent Summit is in fact returning for its second year and expanding: no longer a symbolic aside, but two mornings of sessions, on May 15 and 16, in an invitation-only format, at the Plage des Palmes. The summit will bring together cinema and technology executives to discuss concrete applications of AI in creative and industrial processes, with three declared focuses: integrating AI into production workflows, ethical and responsible use, and training. Translation: this is no longer about science fiction, but about the production chain.

When a market like Cannes shifts the conversation from “AI that might arrive someday” to “AI that must be organized,” it means the industry has already moved beyond the phase of abstract controversy. As at Filmart 2026, the concrete discussion now is about who decides how to use it, where to insert it, which costs it cuts, which roles it reshapes, and with what moral language it can be made presentable. Unlike what is happening in Asia, however, where micro-dramas are already eroding the time and space of social platforms — even Google, after losing the social media race with the failed Google+, has already moved to the front line on micro-dramas — Cannes continues to privilege authorship over the logic of pure consumption.

Alongside AI, the Marché is launching the Creator Economy Summit for the first time, scheduled for May 17 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., again at the Plage des Palmes, and open to Festival and Marché badge holders. Its function is perfectly clear: to build a bridge between traditional cinema and the creator economy, meaning that world of digital creators who grew up on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok and are no longer seen as external noise, but as a reservoir of IP, audience, talent and marketing. The summit promises case studies, collaboration stories, scouting for new talent, adaptations of digital properties into film projects, and reflections on how to bring communities born online into movie theaters.

The cinema of the future at Cannes is not contemplated: it is packaged

The Village Innovation, on the Pantiero side of the Village International, returns as the heart of Cannes Next and exceeds 1,000 square meters, with a 500 m² pavilion for conferences, demos and presentations, a 250 m² terrace for networking and, above all, a major emphasis on virtual production, which the Marché presents as one of the cornerstones of the 2026 experience. It is the signal of a market that does not merely want to talk about innovation, but to stage it live, make it demonstrable, sellable, photographable.

The immersive sector is also growing. The Immersive Market is moving to the Carlton Hotel, next to the Festival’s immersive competition, and is getting a new 450 m² space, capable of hosting between 80 and 225 participants at the same time. No longer isolated micro-experiences for a handful of viewers at a time, but a configuration designed for shared experiences on a larger scale. In parallel, the market expects the involvement of 150 immersive producers and catalog holders and 90 distributors and curators, with live demos and a structure explicitly oriented toward location-based distribution. If cinema expands beyond the classic screen, Cannes wants to be the place where that transformation immediately meets buyers.

Finally, there is the less glamorous but perhaps more revealing piece: innovation, when it stops being a slogan, becomes infrastructure. Cinando, the online platform launched in 2003 and completely relaunched in 2026, becomes the unified container of the Marché’s new digital ecosystem. The platform has been redesigned, extended to include TV and immersive content, and the old Marché du Film Online, created in 2020 during the pandemic for remote participants, is now absorbed into the new system. Online screenings, conference videos, networking and business tools all end up inside a single environment.

Executive director Guillaume Esmiol summed up the Marché’s line by speaking of innovation that must serve both artistic creativity and the growth of the industry.