10 Movies You Never Knew Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival
When the famous golden palm leaf of the Cannes Film Festival appears on a movie poster, it tends to signify that something artistically sophisticated or politically resonant is in store.
This usually tracks for most of the movies that premiere there, but Cannes simply wouldn’t be Cannes without at least a few big-budget curveballs.
Since the 1980s, the festival has often used its Out of Competition, Opening Night Gala, and Midnight Screening slots (and occasionally even the competition itself) to present the kind of movies that guarantee hype, media coverage, and a spattering of big-name stars to walk the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s iconic red carpet and stairs. In other words, they need blockbusters, and this has led to many movies showing up in Cannes that might surprise you.
In the list below, I’ve rounded up ten of the most unusual of these from the last 40 years or so. Read on to learn a bit more about each of them and use the guide to find out where to stream them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video, and elsewhere.
With no need for a ranking here, let’s kick things off with the pièce de résistance of surprising Cannes competition titles—or rather, two of them. The first came in 2001, when a movie from DreamWorks Animation was partially made to troll Disney by a producer who had been fired from the mouse house a few years earlier. We are talking about perhaps the strangest ever film to be selected in competition in Cannes, where it went up against a selection of movies that included The Piano Teacher, Mulholland Drive and Jean Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love. That movie was Shrek.
We will sadly never know what Liv Ullman’s jury made of it all, but the festival’s organisers were apparently big enough fans of the first instalment of the lovable green ogre that Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz found themselves walking the red carpet again three years later for Shrek’s even better sequel.
For context, this means that more Shrek films have competed for the Palme d’Or in the festival's entire history than Disney animated films (only Dumbo) and Studio Ghibli films (zero) combined. Respect.
Despite not directing a huge amount of movies in his long and storied career, George Lucas has had a consistent relationship with the Cannes Film Festival over the years. He went there in 1971 with his debut feature, THX 1138, and received an honorary Palme d’Or as recently as 2024, but Lucas’ biggest Cannes moment arguably came in 2005 with the Out of Competition premiere of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
After the critical (darth)mauling received by the first two movies in the prequel trilogy, it was expected that Episode III would follow that trend and receive an icy reception from the festival’s high brow crowd, but Sith actually ended up going down quite well, with plenty of fans showing up in costume and many critics praising the movie’s intricate political themes— some even suggesting that the movie might be an allegory for the War in Iraq. At the time of writing, Lucas has yet to confirm this.
Another unlikely Cannes title to get a great reception was Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s 2015 addition to the Road Warrior’s decades-long saga and a movie that is seen by most fans and critics as the best action movie of the 2010s. Of course, this one came in on a wave of hype, so it’s probably not surprising that the movie’s screenings were such a sensation.
I was lucky enough to be in the room for Fury Road’s premiere that year, and I stood and applauded for all three of the ovations that it received that night—two of which came during the movie. Miller returned in 2024 with his follow-up, Furiosa, but after the movie’s decades-long production, that night with Fury Road is surely the one he cherishes the most.
These days, Cannes tends to open the festival with a middle-brow European crowd-pleaser that most people present and outside never hear of again—but this wasn’t always the case. From the ‘90s up till around 2013, the slot was used as a launchpad for a wide range of starry Hollywood productions—including Moonrise Kingdom, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Moulin Rouge!
One I would have liked to be at was the 2006 opener, The Da Vinci Code—Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s gazillion-dollar best-selling novel, which (along with this insane looking promotional pyramid on the Croisette) raised the festival curtain that year. Critics tore the movie apart at the time, of course, but having rewatched the trilogy recently, I must say it’s aged pretty well (especially if you’re a fan of the National Treasure movies)—and if you decide to revisit, the sequel Angels & Demons is even better.
Did the attendees at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival have the time of their life? With Dirty Dancing premiering that year in an Out of Comp slot, I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t have.
The Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze-starring romance, which centres on an affluent New York teenager who falls in love with her dance instructor while on summer break, is of course now considered an ‘80s classic, but it was a relatively low-budget production for the time, and few could have predicted that it would go on to become such a major hit. It remains unavoidable to this day—and long may that last.
A European director? Check. A French star in Jean Reno? Check. One of the most legendary bits of IP in cinema history? Double check. After the world-conquering success of Independence Day, Roland Emmerich’s stock was at an all-time high when he arrived in Cannes with the first-ever Hollywood version of Godzilla in 1998, but in the end, the movie was sadly a bit of a dud.
Critics at the time were quick to blast Emmerich’s take on the franchise, and to bemoan the Hollywoodization of such an icon of Japanese cinema—but the movie still went on to sell plenty of tickets, even if it was nowhere near the hit that Tristar studios had expected it to be. Alas, we’ll always have Jamiroquai.
Despite Cannes’s surprising history of premiering big-budget movies, the festival has never fully embraced the Superhero genre—or perhaps the Superhero genre has never embraced it?
Whatever the case, the only movie of this kind that I’m aware of to ever play the festival was Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand — a trilogy-closing turkey that is possibly, at least by some metrics, the worst Superhero movie ever. Is it possible that the god awful Last Stand turned Cannes off superhero movies for good—and just two years before the MCU got rolling? I guess we’ll never know.
One opening night movie that I would have died to have been present for was the 1992 screening of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. In the late ‘80s, with RoboCop and Total Recall, the Dutch filmmaker had managed to conquer Hollywood with a blend of provocative and thought-provoking filmmaking that nobody had ever really seen before on that scale—but Basic Instinct saw him push the boat out even further with a movie that felt like a modern, psychosexual update on Hitchcock.
The festival that year had started on a sad note when news came in that Marlene Dietrich had passed away, but if there was a solemn mood in the air, Verhoeven’s movie presumably woke everyone up. Sharon Stone basically became an overnight star, and Michael Douglas has spoken in the years since about the shock of seeing some of the more salacious scenes projected on the Lumiere’s gargantuan screen. It doesn’t get more Cannes than that, baby.
Far from being a weird outlier, the Shrek Cannes phenomenon actually was just the beginning of a beautiful relationship between Cannes and DreamWorks. Two years after Shrek 2, the studio was back with Over the Hedge and returned as recently as 2014 with How to Train Your Dragon 2, but the 2008 screening of Kung Fu Panda still sounds like the weirdest of the bunch.
Mere hours before the movie was set to premiere, Jack Black arrived by speed boat onto a dock near the Palais before posing for the cameras with a group of giant dancing pandas—with whom Black, of course, danced, too. If that’s not a slice of Cannes je ne sais quoi, then I don’t know what is.
