TIFF Launches Its First Official Film Market

The Hollywood Reporter reports Toronto has finally opened TIFF: The Market, a new industry marketplace running Sept. 10-16 with Herzog, Snyder and Hanks projects on sale.

After years of unofficial dealmaking at the festival, The Hollywood Reporter reports that Toronto has launched an official market, called TIFF: The Market, running alongside North America's biggest film festival from September 10-16. According to THR, market boss Charles Tremblay has positioned the event as neither a direct competitor to November's AFM nor to October's TV confab MIPCOM in Cannes. The outlet describes plans that are 'both modest and boldly ambitious': a core finished-film market plus presales, co-financing and packaging opportunities, extending to television, interactive projects and games, all pitching at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The debut year is framed by THR as an experiment, with projects at various stages testing different financing and distribution strategies to see how the market responds.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that Toronto has long hosted informal dealmaking, capped by the record $15 million sale of Curry Barker's box office sensation *Obsession* at last year's festival — a deal Capstone Studios' Christian Mercuri negotiated with Focus Features. THR quotes Mercuri saying, 'It's a tough market, but there's a lot of opportunity if you're doing original ideas that push the envelope a little bit and take risks,' adding that indie success with original fare 'is not hearsay anymore.' The launch arrives, per THR, with momentum and goodwill from a battered industry hungry for signs of recovery. Meanwhile, Yahoo (citing Variety) reports the festival's 2026 Indigenous slate — ten world-premiering features across sections like Platform, Discovery and Centrepiece — is drawing global partners and buyers, part of what the outlets describe as a supercharged industry presence this year.

The Hollywood Reporter lists the market's headline projects. Werner Herzog's *Bucking Fastard* teams the director with Rooney and Kate Mara as spooky, unison-speaking sisters digging a tunnel 'in search of an imaginary land' (HanWay Films, Gersh). Zack Snyder brings *The Last Photograph*, a decades-in-the-making indie about an ex-DEA agent's jungle revenge, which THR calls a trial by fire for the blockbuster director on the indie market. Tom Hanks stars as Abraham Lincoln in Duke Johnson's stop-motion/live-action *Lincoln in the Bardo*, which THR calls one of the year's most ambitious swings. Other titles include Michelle Yeoh's action thriller *The Surgeon* (193, WME), Courteney Cox's finished, unsold true-crime dramedy *Evil Genius*, Cynthia Erivo's awards-buzzed *Prima Facie* (Embankment, CAA, UTA), and *NAZA*, the documentary follow-up from two directors of Oscar winner *No Other Land* (mk2).

The Hollywood Reporter frames the freshman market as a time for experimentation, mixing international auteurs like Herzog and Malgorzata Szumowska with actor-turned-filmmakers Courteney Cox and Tim Blake Nelson, and pairing art house fare with commercial genre plays. Per THR, *Evil Genius* aims to replicate what Steven Soderbergh did with *The Christophers* at TIFF last year: convert a finished, unsold film's gala bow into a domestic sale. Yahoo's report, drawing on Variety, suggests buyers are also watching a diverse acquisition slate, with programmers like Jason Ryle noting that contemporary Indigenous cinema increasingly attracts global partners without 'centering' historical contexts. Whether TIFF: The Market can become a durable marketplace — and whether high-profile gambles like Snyder's or the stop-motion *Bardo* find buyers — will be the test of its opening Sept. 10-16 run.