At this year’s Cannes festival and beyond, big Hollywood films have taken a backseat, and smaller independent productions have taken center stage.
As a result, major studios have begun opening their wallets wide. At the heart of it all is Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, which earned a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes upon its world premiere. Having received a seven-minute standing ovation, none of the major studios, including Netflix, Warner Bros., Clockwork, and Searchlight Pictures, amongst others, wasted time placing competing bids to acquire it for global distribution. The bids grew higher and higher until A24 spared no expense, and the price was capped at $17 million.
Having already earned a Sundance nomination for his 2016 short Call Your Dad and built a following through Impressions, his popular Instagram skits, Firstman has outdone himself with this directorial debut. It is a multi-award-nominated feature-length film he wrote, directed, and starred in.
The film introduces newcomer Reggie Absolom as Peter’s son, Arlo, and also marks Cara Delevingne’s return to the big screen after a hiatus. They, alongside the rest of the cast, are bolstered by a production team that includes Academy Award winner Alex CoCo (Anora) and Emmy Award winner Adam Newport-Berra (The Studio) as Director of Photography.
The story follows Peter, an over-the-hill and drug-happy underground party promoter played by Firstman himself, whose life takes an unexpected turn when he begins to take responsibility for his newly discovered preteen son. Arlo’s arrival into Peter’s club life soon helps them both shed the skin buried beneath all that white powder, but not without the weight of a decade spent under the strobe lights and the buzz of New York’s party life.
Firstman balances broad comedy and genuine earnestness in Club Kid in such a way that Deadline reported Cara Delevingne shed tears during the screening at the Claude Debussy Theatre, despite having read the script and acted out those same scenes over and over again.
It is little wonder the film has been nominated in three categories at Cannes: Un Certain Regard, the section where it had its world premiere; the Camera d’Or; and the Queer Palm.
As filmmakers and cinemagoers await the results on 23rd May, A24, still building out its awards roster, is expected to feel confident that its acquisition was an investment well worth the cost.
While this remains an expectation for Club Kid, it is already very much the reality for Curry Barker’s supernatural horror film, Obsession.
Obsession premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2025. Produced on a budget of less than $1 million, it was acquired by Focus Features for $15 million, the highest price ever commanded for a genre film at TIFF. It was theatrically released on 15th May and has since crossed $31 million. It was modestly projected to make half its bid price over its opening weekend, but it came close to that figure on its first day alone.
Projections were immediately revised upward, yet the film still outperformed them, debuting at $17 million, $3 million above the adjusted forecast. It has since gone on to surpass some major studio productions that were released at the same time.
Obsession has been described as a horror film that leans into the well-worn “be careful what you wish for” trope but revitalises it in a way that feels genuinely new.
Curry Barker, the YouTube short-form horror and comedy filmmaker turned director, writer, and editor of the feature, spoke about its origins in an interview published by the Motion Pictures Association. He mentioned that the production team “would have been happy for this movie to stream on Shudder. That would have been a big deal for us.”
He added that “the people who were green-lighting this movie were thinking, ‘Hey, if there’s a horror audience that wants to see the craziest horror movie ever, even if it’s a niche audience, let’s do it.'” As it turns out, the film far exceeded their expectations, much like it did for the main character, Baron “Bear” Bailey.
The film explores the parallel between being a victim and an oppressor and how that position can shift on the back of small, unconscious decisions. It also shines a light on how people can arrive at harmful extremes without realising it, leaving everyone involved to deal with consequences none of them saw coming.
Following strong reviews and a record-breaking box office run, Obsession is projected to be the most groundbreaking horror film of 2026, with the performance of female lead Inde Navarrette being widely described as Oscar-worthy.
A24 has moved quickly on its read of Barker’s talent, enlisting him to direct a Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.
Both Club Kid and Obsession are proof that the most arresting stories this year are coming from filmmakers who took the smallest budgets and the most personal visions into rooms that were not built for them, but walked out with the biggest conversations.
