Venice’s 2026 Slate Brings Auteur Heat Without Studio Muscle

Forbes singles out Wild Horse Nine as a McDonagh film set before the 1973 CIA-assisted coup that removed Chilean leader Salvador Allende, with Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich playing CIA officers. That is a sharp setup for McDonagh, whose best work tends to turn moral rot into something funny enough to make the laughter feel suspect.

Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard is also in the mix, according to Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, with Rooney Mara, Kate Mara and Orlando Bloom attached. That title alone sounds like it wandered in from some lost Herzog notebook, which is not a bad place for Venice to be.

Photo: Currier and Ives, New York · Public domain · source

Photo: Eva Rinaldi · CC BY-SA 2.0 · source

Barbera Says the Studio Gap Came From Timing, Not a Boycott

The Hollywood Reporter asked artistic director Alberto Barbera about the lack of major studio movies, and his answer was blunt: no big studio films were available. He said Venice had hoped for Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Digger, with Tom Cruise, but Warner Bros. chose an October release without a festival stop.

Barbera also told The Hollywood Reporter that Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning was not ready because of planned reshoots, David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth had been delayed, and Dune 3 was not ready for Venice. Deadline similarly reports that Barbera had chased Digger, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, Artificial and Dune: Part 3, but the titles did not land.

The more interesting case may be Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial. Barbera told The Hollywood Reporter he had seen it and loved it, but said Neon was not ready to release the film until early 2027, apart from an Oscar-qualifying December run. That is the kind of absence that still leaves a mark: a major filmmaker, a festival that wanted the film, and a distributor making a calculation beyond the glamour of the Lido.

One Woman in Competition Is the Lineup’s Hardest Fact

The statistic will hang over the festival. The Hollywood Reporter says May El-Toukhy’s Danish drama Woman Unknown is the only competition title directed by a woman. Deadline also identifies May-el Toukhy as the lone woman in the 20-film competition, with a post-World War II drama.

Barbera told The Hollywood Reporter he was “desperate” about the situation and said the number of feature films directed by women had fallen below 24 percent this year. He argued that Venice selects competition titles by quality, not gender, while also pointing to producers and financiers as earlier links in a chain the festival does not control.

That explanation may be sincere, but sincerity does not soften the number. Venice signed the 50/50 by 2020 pledge in 2018, as The Hollywood Reporter notes. Nearly a decade later, one woman in a 20-film competition is not a footnote. It is part of the story the festival is telling, whether it wants to or not.

Documentaries and Familiar Faces Keep Venice Busy

Barbera told The Hollywood Reporter that Venice has more documentaries than usual this year and had dropped the idea of screening many TV series because the available series were not strong enough. Forbes reports a documentary section with work from Alex Gibney and Wim Wenders, along with immersive experiences.

Deadline adds several red-carpet draws outside the pure competition frame: Russell Crowe with the documentary What Love Builds, and Noel and Liam Gallagher expected for Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, about the band’s reunion tour. Forbes also reports that George Clooney will receive a lifetime achievement award.

So Venice 2026 is not short on names. It is short on one kind of name: the studio-backed title arriving with a full awards apparatus already built around it. That may leave more room for the films to surprise people. It may also make the absences louder. Either way, the first big fall festival now has its cards on the table: McDonagh before a coup, Moretti back at Venice after 37 years, one woman in competition, and a Lido preparing to start awards season without the usual studio roar.

Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours.