Cannes Contenders 2026: The USA

Coinbase Your Way Out

The visual spectacle of it is incredible, I never get tired of watching it. (Go find the BTS video of how it was made [below], it’s fascinating.) MJZ director Oscar Hudson used real actors and in-camera effects to create a seemingly-virtual world, brought together through amazing visual effects by Ethos and Selected Works.

The message was clear and the delivery was fun to watch.

I also think it was bold for a crypto company to position the intimidating world of cryptocurrency as your “way out” of the traditional financial system - making the world you’re familiar and comfortable with somehow scarier than the unknown and untested. The message was clear and the delivery was fun to watch.

XBox Wake Up

Is it just too obvious for me to pick something co-directed by David Fincher? Maybe. But man, it didn’t disappoint. (It was brilliantly co-directed by Romain Chassaing.) Sure, the concept of escaping the 'rat race' has been beaten to death (and then gnawed on by rats), but the filmmaking craft on display here makes up for it.

The music and editing are great.

Every little detail of Horatio the rat’s story was thought-through, from the headline on the tiny newspaper to the items on his rat coworkers’ desks. And the music and editing are great.

Penguins International Protest March of the Penguins

McDonald and Heard are two entirely uninhabited islands in Antarctica. So, it was an odd diplomacy tactic for the US president to slap these peopleless islands with a 10% tariff in early 2025. The gaff sparked headlines across the internet colder than the islands themselves, and thrust the island's only residents - penguins - into the news cycle.

Penguins International and Rethink Toronto hilariously seized on the headlines and re-framed the penguins’ annual migration as a ‘protest march’ against the US president’s policies (both financial and environmental.) A humorous teaser campaign and subsequent live-stream garnered millions of views and boosted donations for the conservation nonprofit.

Apple Slide

Another example of what Apple has always done well: a great product demo. To highlight the iPhone 17’s scratch-resistant screen, we watch lawyers slide an iPhone back-and-forth, face down, across an impossibly-long conference table as they negotiate.

It’s brilliant in its simplicity.

Directed by David Shane, it’s brilliant in its simplicity. Anyone who owns a smartphone (so basically everyone, other than the incarcerated and a handful of people in nursing homes) will cringe at the sound design alone. With great casting, great editing and very few words, we all walk away completely sold on a new iPhone feature

Uber Eats Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial

Shameless plug for one of our own! After two years accusing football of being one big conspiracy to sell food, this Super Bowl Uber Eats put all the evidence into their own app and gave fans control of their Super Bowl commercial with a new 'Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial' restaurant. Just like ordering a burrito bowl or a salad, football fans could order their own version of the Uber Eats Super Bowl commercial. Every ‘ingredient’ chosen unlocked different evidence of football selling food - revealing new scenes, jokes and celebrity cameos.

Every frame was human-crafted and designed to fit together seamlessly.

Together with Special US, Uber Eats wrote, produced, edited and scored over a thousand possible versions of their spot. Every frame was human-crafted and designed to fit together seamlessly, no matter which combinations fans chose.