International Insider: Cannes Closer

It’s almost a wrap, folks! The Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close for another year. Jesse Whittock with you again to run through the second week headlines from the Croisette and further afield. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Cannes Closer

Over to Zac Ntim in Cannes… Nearly there: The frontrunners for this year’s Palme d’Or, which is to say, the films critics are buzzing about most, are Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Secret Agent, and Sound of Falling, the second film from Mascha Schilinski. All three are excellent films of gigantic emotional and philosophical scope. My money is on Trier’s film, which is the most complete competition title I saw in Cannes, and its no wonder it achieved a gargantuan 19-minute ovation. Notably, all three films have distribution deals with Mubi. The streamer is now firmly in the distribution game and has also locked deals on Cannes titles Die My Love, and The History of Sound. American distributor Neon has also carved out a large slice of the Cannes pie with North America deals on Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, and Julia Ducournau’s Alpha. It will be interesting to see how both companies position their films by the fall. None of these titles, perhaps excluding Trier’s Sentimental Value, will be the easiest pitch to audiences. Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, for instance, may boast Jennifer Lawrence and Rob Pattinson as leads, but the film is a dark and challenging watch that will require great care in the run-up to any release. Let’s wait and see. Elsewhere this week in Cannes, Spike Lee debuted his latest feature, Highest 2 Lowest. Before the film’s buzzy premiere, its lead, Denzel Washington, was handed a surprise Palme d’Or d’Honneur. The premiere marked Washington’s first appearance on a red carpet in Cannes. However, before the screening was over, Washington was already on a plane back to New York City, where he is leading an Othello revival on Broadway. Cannes ends Saturday and we’ll be reporting live from the closing ceremony. Follow here to see who takes home awards. Deals are still being negotiated at the Marché, so expect more breaking updates, but for now you can entertain and inform yourself by heading to our Cannes Hub, where you can find news, reviews, Deadline Studio interviews, magazine features and more from our tireless team in France. Au revoir for now.

Stunt Biz Exposé

“Sleepwalking” toward disaster: Jake told the sad story of Casey Michaels, a former stuntwoman tipped for the very top, whose career was cut short by a devastating ankle injury while on a Game of Thrones set in 2019. HBO ultimately admitted liability after Michaels sued and paid her £7M ($9.3M), including legal costs, as part of a settlement. However, she had not spoken about the issue publicly before an interview with Deadline, which she agreed to as means of warning that the entire stunt profession is still not learning its lesson. Routinely, the community will “brush injuries under the carpet” and blame performers, rather than those responsible for stunt choreography and safety, we heard. In the UK, a leaked email from a top safety official warned the industry could be “sleepwalking” towards an on-set fatality due to the scattergun nature of its organization. This one is a sobering but pertinent read, worth your time regardless of how familiar you are with the world of stunt performers.

Mediawan’s Moment

A magnet for storytellers: Mediawan has emerged as one of European production’s biggest new players over recent years, even pushing into the U.S. by acquiring Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and the UK with a recent deal for See-Saw Films, which estimates suggest values the Slow Horses maker at around £100M ($134M). However, much less is known about the business than, say, French compatriots Banijay or Studiocanal. As part of Deadline’s excellent Disruptors magazine, Jake took a look under the bonnet, interviewing Mediawan Pictures CEO Elizabeth d’Arvieu and several others connected to the company to build up a picture of a TV and film biz with serious intentions of growing even bigger. With Plan B one of the producers behind British Netflix hit Adolescence and two films, Apple TV+ doc Bono: Stories of Surrender and Sylvain Chomet’s animation The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol, in Cannes over the past week, there’s certainly to come from Mediawan, which keeps disrupting despite turning ten this year. And if you want to know more about the ground-breaking Adolescence, Max wrote this neat Disruptors piece.

Breaking Baz @ Cannes

Party time: The ever-entertaining Baz Bamigboye has been floating around the Croisette beach parties, rubbing shoulders with Spike Lee, Nicole Kidman and Cuba Gooding Jr. among others while musing about the nature of celebrities and recalling interactions with stars in Cannes well over 30 years ago. Few are better able to explain how mega-stardom and the industry mesh together than Baz, or the (occasionally) cheeky methods needed to get into the most-exclusive soirees. Baz rarely gets turned away from anything these days, but this amusing tale of how he made it the Mubi do makes for great reading. Baz’s dispatches from Cannes include interactions with everyone from Akinola Davies Jr, the Nigerian director of My Father’s Shadow, to Urchin director and Beatles movie actor Harris Dickinson and Elsbeth and The Wire actor Wendell Pierce. Find all of Baz’s stories out of Cannes here.

Gary Lineker Accelerates Exit

Don’t open the post: The inevitable has happened. After several run-ins with BBC management over his social media use, Match of the Day host Gary Lineker has finally gone too far for the pubcaster’s top brass. The BBC’s highest-paid presenter, earning £1.35M ($1.8M) a year, will exit after he presents his final Match of the Day highlights show on Sunday — a year earlier than planned – following him sharing a now-deleted Instagram post about the Israel-Gaza conflict that contained an antisemitic trope. Lineker apologized once he’d been informed about the connotations of a cartoon rat overlaid in the video and said he would never “consciously repost anything antisemitic,” but acknowledged that “stepping back” from the BBC felt like “the responsible course of action.” Several industry figures, such as former BBC content chief Danny Cohen and Fulwell Entertainment CEO Leo Pearlman strongly criticized both Lineker and the BBC, the latter for allowing the presenter to sign off at the broadcaster with a “hero’s farewell” this coming Sunday.

The Essentials

🌶️ Hot One: Wayne Gretzky’s all-conquering Edmonton Oilers are the subject of a doc series out of Canada produced by Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort.

🌶️ Another One: The Four Seasons star Marco Calvani is co-writing and directing his second feature film, Capitana, based on marine biologist Pia Kemp’s memoir.

🌶️ A third: Doc, the breakout U.S. medical drama that was based on an Italian series, is getting a remake in Mexico, with Juan Pablo Medina in the lead role.

🏠 In-house: Channel 4 stepped up its plans to produced programs in-house for the first time in its history, a seismic change in the UK TV production sector, and has hired a headhunter to look for the division’s boss.

🏛️ BBC latest: Banijay UK boss Patrick Holland has exited the race to become BBC Chief Content Officer, with Kate Phillips the person to beat, Jake revealed.

🗡️ Cuts: UK broadcaster ITV is axing over 220 roles as part of a major shake-up of its daytime schedule.

🚪 Exiting: Kids TV veteran Paul Robinson is leaving Kartoon Channel Worldwide.

💬 Conference: Germany TV event Seriencamp has published a full program, with speakers from Mediawan, Cattleya, Denmark’s TV2 and the New8.

🏪 New shop: Yôsuke Kubozuka will star in Gomusin, a Japan-UK-South Korea-set film from Average Plus Productions, a new label set up by former Fremantle drama exec Nastasja Borgeot. 

🍿 Box office: New Line/Warner Bros’ Final Destination Bloodlines arrived this past weekend with a $102M global start.

Zac Ntim contributed to this week’s Insider. It was written by Jesse Whittock and edited by Stewart Clarke.