There is a specific type of institutional deterioration that goes unnoticed. It doesn’t come with a dramatic scandal or a single poor year. It builds up. Silently, one sponsor departs. A few high-profile premieres relocate. Deals become less substantial. Additionally, people begin to attend out of habit rather than enthusiasm at some point. Over the course of more than ten years, Telluride, a high-altitude town in southwest Colorado, had a front-row seat to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Although Telluride is not in Texas, its narrative aligns with the larger movement away from TIFF as the focal point of awards season. For many years, it was widely believed that the winner of the TIFF People’s Choice Award was essentially halfway to the Oscars. Slumdog Millionaire. The King’s Address. A slave for twelve years. La La Land. It used to read like a list of modern cinema’s greatest hits. More recently, movies that captivated audiences in September and then faded well before February have begun to read more like curiosities.
When it opened in theaters, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, last year’s People’s Choice winner, hardly made an impression. Fifteen years ago, when a TIFF audience award seemed almost certain, that kind of result would have been unimaginable. The change wasn’t abrupt. Toronto had to make do with what was left after Venice and Telluride began to pull prestige titles earlier in the cycle. Customers took notice. As a result, studios modified their approach.
The financial picture made matters even more difficult. In 2023, Bell Canada withdrew its sponsorship of TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival’s $196 million permanent location on King Street West. The name change felt symbolic in ways that probably no one intended, but the building still stands and functions. At the same time, a number of senior employees had departed the company, and internal discussions regarding identity and direction had reportedly been going on for years without a conclusion.
It’s important to be truthful about what TIFF remains. The audience prize for the 2025 edition went to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and a horror movie called Obsession started a real bidding war that resulted in a $15 million deal from Focus Features, defeating A24 and Neon. That is not insignificant. The stars continued to appear.
The theaters were packed. On King Street, there were real moments of vitality. The festival is still going strong. But there’s a difference between surviving and setting the agenda, and for much of the past decade, TIFF has been doing more of the former than the latter.
What’s strange is that the festival’s struggles don’t stem from a single catastrophic failure. The organization got big — perhaps too big — and the sheer scale that once made it impressive started working against it. Industry veterans began complaining that the event had become bloated, harder to navigate, less useful as a place to actually do business. Audiences grumbled about ticket prices. The Lightbox, designed to serve as a year-round cultural hub for film lovers, drew thinner crowds than expected at its regular screenings outside of festival season. Streaming reshaped what people considered worth leaving the house for.
There’s a feeling, talking to people close to the industry, that TIFF is now at one of those genuine turning points where the decisions made in the next few years will matter enormously. The festival has announced plans to launch a proper film market in 2026, a $16 million initiative backed by the Canadian government, intended to put Toronto alongside Cannes’ Marché as a serious industry marketplace. Whether the timing is right — with the industry still cautious, streamers spending more carefully, and buyers wary of yet another market to attend — is genuinely unclear.
What isn’t unclear is that the prestige race Toronto once dominated has real competition now, and that competition isn’t going away. Venice managed to stay operational through the pandemic more effectively than almost anyone else, and it built real momentum from that period. Movies that would have debuted in Toronto now arrive elsewhere weeks ahead of schedule, creating buzz that Toronto attempts to magnify rather than generate. It’s a small change in the order of things, but order is very important in the film industry.
There may still be something worth fighting for here, according to the 2025 edition. The festival’s appetite hasn’t diminished after fifty years. It’s another matter entirely whether that is sufficient to restore what it once possessed.
