What does the Marché du Film 2026 programme say about the film industry?

In ten days, I’ll be on the Croisette for the Marché du Film, the business end of the Cannes Film Festival. To prepare, I have gone through the conference schedules for this year (as well as 2024 and 2025) to see what these 742 events reveal about the film business in 2026.I’ll go through it in detail later in the article, but here are the key themes as I see them:The conference is shrinking (slightly). The 2026 edition has fewer sessions and about 16% fewer programming hours compared to recent years, despite an increase in attendance. AI is fully integrated. 2024 was about whether AI mattered, whereas 2026 is about what AI agents do for sales teams, how to license a synthetic voice, and how to plug an AI compositor into a virtual-production pipeline.The streamers have stopped showing up. Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney have gone from nine speaker billings in 2024 to one in 2026. Whatever Cannes is for now, it isn’t appealing to streamers.Co-production is the survival mode. When…