Toronto's A-List Casting Cannot Guarantee Artistic Achievement

Toronto's 51st film festival arrives in September trailing the familiar scent of prestige.

Helen Mirren, Seth Rogen, Chris Rock heading world premieres—this is the announcement that matters. The festival's leadership is not being subtle about what it believes will work this year.

This is a repeat of 2010-2012, when Toronto's curators convinced themselves that A-list casting was a proxy for A-tier filmmaking. That era produced countless star vehicles that screened to thunderous silence—films that looked prestigious in the festival program and evaporated the moment critics saw them.

The mechanism is structural and almost mechanical. A-list actors generate media coverage and media coverage generates ticket sales and cultural oxygen. Cultural oxygen feels like legitimacy, but legitimacy and actual artistic achievement operate on different clocks. The Shape of Water premiered at Toronto in 2017, Nomadland in 2020, The Power of the Dog in 2021—and these films succeeded despite that hype, not because of it.

They had something underneath the star power. It was direction with a point of view and material that didn't require famous names to justify itself. The festival's post-2015 awards sweep created a false causation. Having Helen Mirren does not make you Shape of Water. Having Seth Rogen does not make you Nomadland.

What's worth watching for is whether this year's lineup contains films that could survive obscurity. A film worth seeing is one that would matter if nobody had heard of the cast. Check the directors. Check whether the source material or premise suggests something the filmmaker had to say, or whether it's content designed to accommodate star schedules. Watch for work, not availability.