Cannes Contenders 2026: Entertainment

It’s really, really hard not to start this list without first talking about what makes something right for this category.

I’d argue, first and foremost, that if something’s had a broadcast media buy, it doesn’t belong here, no matter how entertaining it is, and should be.

Call me difficult, but I don’t think a TV spot can be called a “3-5 minute fiction film” with a straight face.

So, for the purposes of this: if there’s an endframe, no dice.

The good news is that, even with that filter applied, there’s still plenty of good stuff to look out for...

LEGO x F1 Partnership Launch: Miami Grand Prix

In a world drowning in brand collaboration launches and po-faced celeb endorsements, this stands out not simply for the spectacle of it, but because it is sheer, 10/10 fun.

It is the sort of idea a very confident nine-year-old would come up with, which is to say it combines the genuinely uncynical joy of play with a level of can’t-believe-your-eyes imaginative engineering.

Actual, life-sized, drivable F1 cars! Made of Lego bricks!

The result is money-can’t-buy reactions from some of the most famous men in one of the world’s hottest sports.

No wonder everyone is smiling.

InStyle The Intern

I’m too old to have ever been an intern, but that does not stop me enjoying this.

Six seasons in, it has stopped being a brand stunt and become an actual show people watch on purpose, imagine that.

If you don’t know, it follows real TikTok creators playing catastrophically useless interns; losing ludicrously expensive handbags or scheming their way into the Met Gala, while the real editors and staff stand around looking appropriately either horrified or exasperated.

“It’s like she did too much and nothing at the same time.”

A fashion magazine becoming a modern comedy studio is either very clever or a complete accident, but either explanation makes it more interesting, and it’s probably about time it was recognised as such.

Gucci The Tiger

Fashion film seems to have found some purpose here, as rather than showing Demna’s debut Gucci collection on the runway, the brief went to Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn to make a 30-minute film instead.

It is star-packed, with Demi Moore as the fictional chairwoman of Gucci International, whose birthday dinner gradually descends into drugged drinks and surrealist swimming pools, with Edward Norton, Elliot Page, Keke Palmer and Ed Harris all caught in the luxury wreckage.

It’s absurd and glamorous and slightly menacing, which is presumably exactly what Demna wanted his first collection to feel like.

Replacing a runway show with a film is a big swing, but surely that’s the kind of audacity we’re looking for here?

Nike x Palace Manor Place

If you look closely in this category’s subsections, there is a “C. Community” for ideas that “develop, maintain or nurture a fanbase”.

This, sir, is exactly that.

Nike and Palace took an old south London swimming pool, gutted it, and turned it into a community hub with an ambitious skate park-cum-football pitch at its centre.

All open to the public, six days a week, for free.

Echoing London’s spiritual concrete home of skateboarding, it’s also architecturally notable, an art project in itself.

When most brands spend millions on things that last a campaign cycle, how wonderful to celebrate something with some meaning and permanence to it.

A24 Marty Supreme

If the Entertainment Lions are a marker of cultural phenomenon, it would be remiss not to include the Marty Supreme campaign.

A rare thing where you can’t tell where the film ends and the marketing begins, or vice versa.

From Chalamet standing on top of the Las Vegas Sphere, sure, to a pop-up that gridlocked a New York street, to that “leaked” Zoom call of him pitching to bemused executives.

None of it was an ad campaign, except obviously all of it was.

And maybe that’s exactly what makes something right for this category after all.

Glad that’s cleared things up.