TIFF operates the Lightbox, a year-round multiplex, and is still paying off loans for the building a decade and a half later.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Goodbye King West streetcars, hello Daniel Craig.
Starting Thursday, the Toronto International Film Festival is back for another 11 days of cinema, celebrities and traffic jams (even if the downtown artery of King Street West, or “Festival Street,” has been bereft of TTC streetcars since May because of construction). But as TIFF celebrates its landmark 50th edition with pomp, circumstance and the spectre of all-but-inevitable political protests, it would serve the organization and its many stakeholders (audiences included) to start thinking about what the next 50 years might look like.
Or, more realistically, how the country’s glitziest and most influential cultural institution can even make it to the other side of 55.
Like every other live-arts organization around the world, TIFF has to contend with brutal economic realities. Audience habits have shifted. Government funders are putting their cultural allocations under the microscope. And corporate partners are scurrying away from anything that requires them to either spend money in these recession-wary times and/or associate themselves with politics (genuine or imagined) that might needlessly sully their brands.
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But TIFF also faces uniquely vexing dilemmas all its own.
It operates the Lightbox, a year-round multiplex whose construction loans the organization is still paying off a decade and a half later, and whose business operations are kneecapped by both fierce competitors and an especially fragile theatrical marketplace.
Although TIFF has locked in a three-year agreement with telecom giant Rogers to act as the “presenting partner” of its festival, that deal isn’t commensurate with the former pact between TIFF and long-time partner Bell, which helped sustain the organization outside its annual September event. (Corporate sponsorship was down 16 per cent between 2023 and 2024.)
And, as revealed by the embarrassing back-and-forth fracas between fest organizers and the filmmakers of the Oct. 7, 2023, documentary The Road Between Us, it is clear that the Lightbox is if not in the throes of internal dissent then at the very least on the precipice of acute unease.
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Financially speaking, at least, there are positive signs. After the strike-plagued 2023 festival resulted in stakeholders reducing or cancelling their participation, TIFF ended its 2023 fiscal year with a $6.6-million deficit. But after streamlining the organization’s leadership team and putting a renewed emphasis on revenue generation, TIFF ended its 2024 fiscal year with an excess of $3.1-million in revenue over expenses.
Last year’s festival attendance was also up, with the organization noting a “record-breaking” 700,000 visitors (though that includes an estimate of how many people simply made their way across Festival Street). Meanwhile, the Lightbox recorded $1.3-million in year-round box office receipts from January through December of 2024, up 22 per cent from the year before, according to Comscore data obtained by The Globe and Mail.
Eventual Oscar champion Anora was the Lightbox’s highest-performing title that year – though the film earned nearly three times as much during its run at Cineplex’s Varsity theatre uptown during the same time period – followed by Perfect Days and The Brutalist, all of which played the festival before their general releases.
Mark Eydelshteyn, left, and Mikey Madison in a scene from Anora, which was the Lightbox’s highest-performing title in 2024.The Associated Press
Yet the Lightbox faces the same challenges that every theatre does today – especially venues focused on independent and art-house cinema. In 2018, just before the streaming era fully took hold, the five-screen theatre pulled in $1.6-million in year-round box office, a figure that has not since been topped. And whereas the Lightbox once placed its hope on showcasing foreign-language blockbusters, particularly from South Asia, that plan has faltered.
In 2022, the Tamil-language epic Ponniyin Selvan: I became the Lightbox’s third-highest-grossing new release ever, earning $272,337. In 2023, that film’s sequel delivered just $64,082, with other titles such as 2024’s Vettaiyan ($6,108) and 2025’s Vidaamuyarchi ($1,853) also disappointing.
But when it comes to the headline-grabbing festival itself, TIFF’s biggest obstacle boils down to what can charitably be described as a programming problem.
Although it is premature, perhaps cruel, to judge a festival’s slate before it has even begun, there is a nagging sense that Toronto has fallen too far behind its fall festival competitors in Venice, Telluride and even New York.
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It feels as if TIFF has become too fond of finding a way to say “yes” to a movie of dubious quality – if, say, it comes attached with red-carpet-friendly celebrities, or is being shopped by agencies that need to be placated – when it should instead have the discipline and confidence to say “no.” In effect, Toronto has become an all-you-can-watch buffet of quantity when it should be a more finely curated feast.
Those who follow the industry closely can easily rattle off all the many new prestige-level films that should ideally be playing this year’s festival but are instead choosing to screen elsewhere (Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere).
Of course, no single festival can have everything, and only a privileged contingent of critics who made it out to Venice and Telluride knows how good some of those MIA titles might be. Instead, the real test becomes a one-year-later postmortem of TIFF’s world premieres from 2024 – which is where things get really worrisome.
So many of the much-ballyhooed world premieres that TIFF programmed last year have since either seriously underperformed (the Pamela Anderson drama The Last Showgirl, the Riz Ahmed thriller Relay, the People’s Choice Award winner The Life of Chuck); have yet to even circle a North American release date (K-Pops!, The Deb, Shell, Without Blood, The Salt Path, William Tell); or have nearly disappeared altogether (Ron Howard’s Eden played a smattering of U.S. theatres last month; Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch was dumped straight onto Disney+ in Canada; the Jennifer Lopez drama Unstoppable vanished into the vortex of Prime Video; and poor ol’ Edward Burns’s Millers in Marriage got a blip of a U.S. release this past spring before evaporating from public consciousness).
Nightbitch starring Amy Adams premiered at TIFF last year, but was dumped straight onto Disney+ in Canada.The Associated Press
Of course, TIFF screened a wealth of titles that went on to win over both audiences and the Oscars, including Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, I’m Still Here, The Substance and, for better or worse, Emilia Perez. But all those titles came to Toronto after playing other festivals – which might be fine if TIFF wanted to hark back to its “festival of festivals” roots. That, however, is clearly not the case. TIFF wants to be – and arguably needs to be – the starting line of the Oscars conversation, not the water break.
Perhaps the festival’s ambitious official content market – whose development is being supported by a $23-million investment by the federal government – will help turn things around. Although even on this initiative, there are precious few details about its rapidly approaching 2026 launch. Toronto’s seeming hopes that the competing American Film Market would die off by this point have not come to pass, either.
Like any movie’s journey from script to screen, though, TIFF’s future can all be saved by a fresh rewrite or two. This year’s festival could very well deliver big hits, huge deals and all the other moments that matter. We will all, as always, be watching.
