Does winning Cannes actually help a film at the box office?

Today is the first day of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. 22 films are competing to win the coveted top prize in cinema - the Palme d’Or.Winning a Palme will certainly give you a moment of fame, the adulation of filmmakers, and a chance to boost your next project. But will it help your movie’s chance at the box office?All films which are ‘In Competition’ at Cannes have not yet been released to the public anywhere in the world. Some may have a release lined up, but most will deliberately leave negotiations open, just in case they can use the Cannes buzz to get a better deal.But does winning help?We can’t definitively prove cause and effect, but we can certainly look for patterns in the data. I built a dataset of every main competition film at Cannes, Berlin and Venice between 1990 and 2024. That gave me 2,159 competition slots across 35 years. Do Cannes-winning films perform well at the box office?Let’s start with the headline figure - yes, films which win the Palme d’Or do…