A crypto breeze swept through the 2022 Cannes Film Festival with splashy and high-profile appearances from the who’s who of the crypto community.
Binance CEO CZ graced the red carpet and served slices in a local pizzeria to mark the Bitcoin Pizza Day. The Sandbox and Bitcoin OG Charlie Shrem hosted beach parties and launched a crypto-powered film financing platform.
The film festival’s business innovation strand, Cannes Next hosted an NFT Showcase and Business Brunch. It promised to showcase the opportunities NFTs offer creators, producers, financiers, and studios. At the Future of Film event, filmmaking platforms FF3 and Decentralized Pictures discussed how Web3 would change film funding, production, and distribution.
Phil McKenzie of FF3 says it’s still very early days for Web3 filmmaking. He highlighted that few companies, that have set their mission out, are raising funds. It’s about getting money into productions and seeing the practical emergence of what they are creating. But at the moment, only a handful of projects have been successful. Director Miguel Faus, renowned for his feature film Calladita, raised funds through crypto. Faus believes the Web3 revolution is definitely coming to film. He says no other art form is as centralized as cinema. No other art form is as prone to a decentralization revolution as cinema – it’s unstoppable.
James Mackie, of MovieCoin – a crypto crowdfunding platform, pointed out that Web3 will create new routes into the film industry. He believes that a budding film producer doesn’t have to have anything, not even experience. They can get it made. Mackie says the crowd will upvote the movie that they would like to see made. Faus argued that Web3 will allow filmmakers whose stories currently go untold to rally a community behind them.
Using crypto and NFTs will lead to a more diverse cinema.
