Cannes: Can NFTs make the film business a better place?

In the 2000s, the dot-com industry completely monopolized the Cannes Film Festival. Some of the hottest start-ups in technology have come to Cannes’s historic Croisette, where they’ve covered hotel facades with banner and billboard adverts, boasting that their technologies would alter Hollywood’s film business. A year later, the banners were gone. The technological euphoria was over.

Today, the history repeats itself as NFT projects and crypto whales and calves flock to Cannes to become part not only of the film festival festivities, but also the industry itself.

Cannes vs NFTs and Web3

According to the Cannes Film Festival, dot-coms are now replaced by cryptocurrencies and blockchain,. Crypto and NFT-sponsored talks, parties, and activities are everywhere on the Croisette this year. FTX, a crypto trading company, will contribute to AmfAR’s Cannes Gala by sponsoring a large chunk of the event. “Web 3.0,” “metaverse,” and “NFT” were among the buzzwords used by Internet start-ups at Cannes this year, but their claims that they would revolutionise the film industry  seem a little bit dated.

Nothing is known about the new technology that will be a part of the next wave, just as there was nothing known about the internet in the year 2000. After all, creating a distributed digital database of films for example, might be accomplished with the assistance of a simple IPFS protocol.

Non-fungible tokens, we all know as NFTs, are constructed on top of the blockchain, which is a distributed digital database or ledger technology, used to validate transactions. To put this another way, you may consider non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be digital contracts for digital goods and services. 

At the same time, few projects and film aficionados are already making headway into the industry and NFT integration. Some, distribute tokens that grant access to a download of Kevin Smith’s upcoming comedy-horror anthology ‘Kilroy Was Here’. What’s interesting though, is that NFTs allow to expand the utility and the film acquisition process. These NFT collectors  will also receive a limited edition digital artwork featuring Sylvester Stallone as part of the package. 

NFTs expand use cases

There is no need for human intervention in the decision-making process when a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) is built with the help of blockchain and NFT technology. All decisions, such as whether or not to give the green light to a film project or grant permission to cast key talent, are voted on by the organization’s users and owners.

You’re not the only one who felt a rush of excitement reading the preceding lines. However, considering how hundreds of blockchain projects never reach fruition, how NFT projects get rug-pulled, and how corporations try to ride the NFT hype train, this may all end up being just another unrealized attempt.

The first purveyors

A new partnership between DCP and the Gotham Film & Media Institute will see the latter provide chosen movies with a cash prize of $50,000 in advance of the Cannes Film Festival. The Decentralized Content Project (DCP), which operates on a not-for-profit basis, asserts that the use of blockchain technology will decentralize, democratically vote on, and publicly monitor everything from user-submitted ideas to audience responses. 

In many countries, the financing of films is subject to stringent regulations. As a direct consequence of this development, a great number of crypto-backed projects could be put on pause. The fact that the NFT entertainment technology sector is still in its infancy and has not yet generated a success story, serves as evidence that we may still not know how great of a push, both crypto and NFTs can provide to Hollywood and Cannes film medium.