Festivals, labor, and the law

Anything meant for wide release runs into three gatekeepers at once, and they explain the studios' strategies better than any tool demo. Festivals are splitting into two tracks. A dedicated circuit now validates the work: Runway's AI Film Festival drew about six thousand submissions in 2025, and a separate World AI Film Festival in Cannes reports submissions rising from around fifteen hundred to over seven thousand year over year. The established festivals are more cautious, and their rules are still settling: Tribeca screened a full-length AI-generated film as a special event rather than in competition in 2026, while Cannes has kept generative features out of official competition and routed commercial AI work through its market instead. The consistent line so far is acceptance as a showcase, not yet as a competition equal, and any precise account of a given festival's rules should be treated as contested and time-stamped rather than settled.

Labor is the binding constraint, and the union's position is not blanket opposition but consent and compensation. SAG-AFTRASAG-AFTRAThe United States labor union representing actors and other media performers, whose agreements require consent and compensation for any digital replica.'s agreements require separate, specific, informed consent before a digital replicaDigital replicaThe industry and union term for an AI-generated reproduction of a real performer's voice or likeness, the thing SAG-AFTRA requires consent to create and use. of a performer is created or used, and let performers suspend that consent during a strike. When Sora 2 launched in late 2025, the union rejected an opt-out default as insufficient, and after member pressure, led publicly by Bryan Cranston, OpenAI moved voice and likeness use toward opt-in. The pattern to expect is that the higher up the value chain a project sits, the more the two-consents standard, one consent to create a replica and a separate consent for each use, becomes non-negotiable.