From Venice opening day to the TIFF awards ceremony morning, the Oscar season received its usual amount of new twists and turns out of Venice, Telluride, and Toronto. In a way, one could argue nothing has really changed, at least at the top of a few important races. Yet in others and especially on the Best Picture bubble, things are more chaotic than ever with no signs of clarity anytime soon.
To that end, here are the big stories from the fall festival gauntlet that set pundits and festival audiences on fire over the last three weeks.
“La Bola Negra” Is “The Odyssey’s” Certified Best Picture Rival – To A Point
After Cannes and this past summer, it was already common to predict that “The Odyssey” and “La Bola Negra” were the top two in Best Picture. Now TIFF People’s Choice voters have all but set it in stone, once they chose “La Bola Negra” as the overall winner instead of the International People’s Choice winner.
With Oscar season looking like a two-film race for the second year in a row – pending the last few unseen competitors – the big question is whether “The Odyssey” and “La Bola Negra” are any closer to each other than “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” were all last year. Although the Next Best Picture team now has both films virtually dead even, “La Bola Negra’s” new momentum will need to translate to Los Javis making a real charge against Christopher Nolan for Best Director, and perhaps to setting up Guitarricadelafuente as a threat in the still open Best Supporting Actor race, before it can approach the kind of overall win package “The Odyssey” is still heavily favored for.
“Wild Horse Nine” And “The Debut” May Be Further Back Than They First Appeared
When “Wild Horse Nine” sparked Oscar buzz and immediate Best Actor favorite status for John Malkovich at Venice, and when “The Debut” sparked similar buzz and immediate Best Actress favorite status for Julianne Moore, it looked like their window to be true Best Picture-winning threats was open. In fact, each seemed to have the potential to sweep a lead acting Oscar, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Original Screenplay and pose a real threat to “The Odyssey’s” possible Oscar haul.
However, TIFF appeared to give them both a harsh reality check, as each failed to win the People’s Choice or place in the top three. Despite remaining winnable threats to sweep the lead acting Oscars, and appearing to still be 1-2 for Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay, “Wild Horse Nine” and “The Debut” are far more fragile Best Picture win threats at the end of TIFF than they looked out of Telluride and Venice.
At the moment, the most likely scenario is that “Wild Horse Nine” and “The Debut” cancel each other out or fall victim to other competitors in big categories, even if they each still win one or two major Oscars anyway. But winning three above-the-line Oscars is probably the only way either of them can threaten “The Odyssey” or “La Bola Negra” – and whatever window they had to be that dominant and threatening may have been closed or halfway shut at Toronto.
TIFF Gave Us Three Frontrunners In The Race For Oscar Season “Villain”
An Oscar season “villain” usually threatens to win Best Picture or something else big despite being far less acclaimed than other favorites, and they usually emerge from Toronto. After TIFF failed to launch that kind of villain in 2024 and 2025, it made up for it big time with the results of its 2026 voting.
As long anticipated or outright feared and loathed since its first TIFF screening, Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky” is now guaranteed to inspire “Green Book” memories and nightmares for the next six months, even though it only placed first runner-up at TIFF instead of winning. In addition, memories and returning nightmares of “CODA” may be on deck as well, after Sian Heder guided “Being Heumann” to a surprise second runner-up finish – and unlike “I Play Rocky” at Amazon, “Being Heumann” is guaranteed to be the No. 1 priority at Apple.
For good measure, “Elsinore” is a third lower-rated film to get a huge TIFF boost, after its surprise International People’s Choice win. In that case, no one regards potential Best Actor frontrunner Andrew Scott as a “villain” yet. Still, to those who fear “Elsinore” breaking into other categories like Best Picture – and threatening “Obsession” as Focus Features’ No. 1 film – this outcome seemed sinister as well.
A Best Picture bubble with “I Play Rocky,” “Elsinore,” and “Being Heumann” threatening to knock off far more acclaimed films for the last slots may well be overkill. But if one or even two threaten to become the next “F1” – if not the next “Green Book” or “CODA” – Toronto will have restored order as the festival where the most divisive contenders of the season are born.
Venice Offered Little Help Once Again
While TIFF threw things into chaos with a slew of new bubble films, Venice failed to clear up anything in other ways. For the third straight year, the Venice festival winners were largely made up of what may be non-factors the rest of the season, with the exception of Volpi Cup Best Actor winner Malkovich.
Beyond that, “Wild Horse Nine” appeared to be the only sure-fire future Best Picture nominee and challenger out of Venice, while projected threats like “Ink” fell short of expectations, films like “Bunker” disappointed exactly as feared, and the likes of “Possible Love” and “Primetime” still have uncertain paths ahead. Once Oscar nomination morning comes, if “Wild Horse Nine” is the only Venice premiere to make any kind of noise, it may not be much of a surprise – and may continue a growing Venice tradition.
The Pecking Order Of Several Studios Remains A Mess
Studios like A24, NEON, Focus, Netflix, Amazon and Searchlight came into the festivals hoping to clear up what their top films really are this season. While Searchlight can feel more confident that “Wild Horse Nine” is its No. 1 for the year – pending “Behemoth!’s” NYFF premiere – and Netflix is even more certain that “La Bola Negra” is its best hope for Best Picture, there is still a lot of confusion everywhere else.
For a time during the festivals, A24 had as many as five films crowded together with Best Picture buzz, between “The Debut’s” initial smash at Telluride, “Club Kid” backing up its Cannes buzz at Telluride and TIFF, “Primetime” landing at Venice, the ultra-surprising in more ways than one documentary “You Can See Everything” making an historic Telluride launch, and “The Invite” waiting nervously to see where it would drop afterward. Yet with “The Debut” and “Club Kid” each getting snubbed from the TIFF top three, “The Invite” somehow ended festival season with a better shot to remain A24’s No. 1 or No. 2 option than it did at the start.
The chaos spread to other studios, as Amazon now has “I Play Rocky” and “Project Hail Mary” fighting to be its headliner; Focus had “Elsinore” make a late case to be side-by-side with “Obsession” after all; NEON seemingly failed to have any separation between “All of a Sudden” and “Fjord” for its top option in International and Best Picture; and Netflix perhaps now has to hope “Possible Love” is its best No. 2 option instead of “Ink.”
Given that four studios each had two films make Best Picture in 2025, there may be at least four studios that make up most of the lineup this year too – and this doesn’t even take into account what Warner Bros will do between “Digger” and “Dune: Part Three.” But while Warner Bros may have that decision made for them soon enough, depending on what becomes of “Digger” these next few weeks, the pecking order of studios like A24, Focus, Netflix, NEON, Amazon and maybe Searchlight may stay thoroughly unsettled a lot longer – and determine the fate of the entire Best Picture bubble.
New York Looms Larger Than Ever
Usually after Venice, Telluride and TIFF, the New York Film Festival is an easier event to sort through by comparison, with festival holdovers and the odd world premiere that rarely shakes up anything huge. However, given how much the fall fests left unresolved this year, NYFF still has a real chance to add some game-changing chaos of its own.
The world premieres of “Behemoth!” on October 2 and “Artificial” on October 5, “Godzilla Minus Zero” on September 26, Sony Pictures Classics and Tom McCarthy’s “A Statement” on October 3, and perhaps also the first post-Telluride screening of “You Can See Everything” on September 30, all have a chance to cause the next seismic wave of this race. At the least, if both “Behemoth!” and “Artificial” live up to their highest expectations, it will provide two more bubble films to make everything that much more crowded, if not two more threats that can go even further.
Beyond “The Odyssey,” “La Bola Negra,” “Wild Horse Nine,” and maybe still “The Debut,” “Project Hail Mary,” “Obsession,” and “The Invite,” the race for the last 2-4 Best Picture spots may look impossible to sort through right now. Yet that will be child’s play compared to what can happen if New York throws in one, two, or more new challengers to add to the growing insanity – on top of whatever “Digger,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “The Social Reckoning,” and the wide release of “Primetime” might also add outside of the festival circuit these next few weeks as well.
The fall festivals tend to complicate things more than they clear up, and beyond the top two of “The Odyssey” and “La Bola Negra,” that is exactly what they look to have done this year too. But while the race in mid-September now looks a lot different than it did in mid-August, that may be nothing compared to what the big events at NYFF and the big premieres elsewhere turn the race into by mid-October – and whatever new context that adds to what we just saw at Venice, Telluride and Toronto.
What films do you think benefitted the most from their fall festival run? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account, and check out Next Best Picture’s latest Oscar predictions here.
