Cannes adds Fast and the Furious screening

Cannes is doing something unusually blunt and crowd-pleasing this year. It added a late-night screening of The Fast and the Furious to the 2026 festival, and not as a joke or a side note — as a formal Midnight Screening inside the official program. That matters because Cannes usually guards its high-art image pretty carefully. This time, it’s making room for a franchise starter that helped define mainstream 2000s studio cinema. ### What exactly did Cannes add? The new piece of news is a May 13, 11:45 p.m. screening of the 2001 original The Fast and the Furious at the Grand Théâtre Lumière. Cannes announced it on May 6 and said Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, producer Neal H. Moritz, and Meadow Walker are expected to attend. That makes it less like a repertory footnote and more like a real event on the Croisette. (festival-cannes.com) ### Why this movie? Because Cannes is selling it as an anniversary moment, not just a nostalgia play. The festival tied the screening to the franchise’s 25th anniversary and leaned hard into the scale of what that first movie became — 11 films, more than $7 billion at the global box office, and a franchise that Universal itself treats as one of its biggest long-term assets. Cannes is basically saying: this is film history too, even if it arrived through street racing and nitrous instead of arthouse prestige. (festival-cannes.com) ### Is Cannes suddenly going mainstream? Not really — but it is widening the frame a bit. The core 2026 Official Selection still looks overwhelmingly international and director-driven, with competition titles from Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, James Gray, Hamaguchi Ryusuke, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Cristian Mungiu, Paweł Pawlikowski, Ira Sachs, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, and Andrey Zvyagintsev. So the Fast screening doesn’t replace the usual Cannes identity. It punctures it, just enough to let in a different kind of movie memory. (festival-cannes.com) ### Where does The Devils fit in? That part sits in Cannes Classics, which is the festival’s restoration-and-film-history lane. Cannes announced that 2026 Classics will include 21 feature films, 3 shorts, 6 documentaries, and two contemporary works, with Ken Russell’s The Devils appearing there in a restored version. So Fast and The Devils are not the same kind of programming move. One is a flashy midnight celebration. The other is a canon-and-restoration statement. (festival-cannes.com) ### What about The White Lotus? That part is real too, and it adds to the sense that Cannes this year will be unusually self-aware about its own mythology. HBO said on April 15 that The White Lotus season 4 had begun filming on the French Riviera and that the story takes place during the Cannes Film Festival. Production is set for Cannes, St. Tropez, and Monaco, with the Hôtel Martinez and Airelles Château de la Messardière used as key hotels. So the festival is not just hosting movies — it’s also becoming scenery for a prestige TV satire about wealth, status, and spectacle. (festival-cannes.com) ### Does the jury still signal “serious Cannes”? Yes. Park Chan-wook is presiding, and the feature-film jury includes Demi Moore, Ruth Negga, Chloé Zhao, Laura Wandel, Diego Céspedes, Isaach De Bankolé, Paul Laverty, and Stellan Skarsgård. That is still a very Cannes-style mix — international, cinephile, and heavy on prestige. The pop gesture is real, but the institution around it still looks like Cannes. (press.wbd.com) ### So what’s the point of all this? Basically, Cannes seems to be acknowledging that film culture is bigger than the old prestige hierarchy. A restored provocation like The Devils belongs there. So does a franchise origin story that genuinely changed popular cinema. The festival still opens on May 12 and runs through May 23 with its usual structure intact. But this year it looks a little less defensive about letting mass culture onto the main stage. (festival-cannes.com) ### Bottom line The Fast screening is small in scheduling terms — one late-night slot. But symbolically, it’s Cannes telling everyone that canon-building now includes blockbusters, restorations, auteurs, and even TV’s version of festival glamour all at once. (festival-cannes.com 1) (festival-cannes.com 2)