“Measuring ovations is deeply silly”: what’s behind the rise of the ‘standing ovation’ story?

Standing ovations have become something of an oddity on the international film festival circuit. They are now so common that they have lost any real impact, and yet they’re constantly in the headlines.

For the most part, they’ve solely been the preoccupation of the Hollywood trade press. But a month after the Cannes Film Festival, a press release from sales agent The Match Factory fluttered into inboxes announcing sales for Karim Aïnouz’s erotic thriller Motel Destino – while highlighting a 14-minute standing ovation following its first Competition screening.

Hyping up a movie for commercial success after a premiere is part of a sales agent’s brief. But as it creeps into sales materials, is the standing ovation quietly becoming a metric of success?

“The duration of the standing ovations in Cannes has become an informal way of measuring the approval rate,” says one source at a European sales outfit. “Of course, nothing is guaranteed and applause doesn’t necessarily mean sales or awards, but it becomes something positive to compare – as an alternative measurement.”

Though it was reviewed by the Hollywood trade outlets, the Motel Destino premiere wasn’t covered by either Variety, Deadline or The Hollywood Reporter. By proactively including its own ovation timing in press materials, the message from the film team was clear: “This matters to us.”

But how much do standing ovations actually matter to the industry?

Adulation across the arts is hardly revelatory. The operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti received 165 curtain calls and 67 minutes of applause after a 1988 performance in Berlin. In New York, standing ovations are a given for most Broadway performances. They’re even becoming more frequent in London’s West End: audiences jumped to their feet after every song by Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger in last year’s Sunset Boulevard revival, much to the horror of British theatre critics.

But traditionally, in film, the standing ovation was hard-earned and reserved for something truly special. They spontaneously occur at major festivals such as Sundance – especially for indie gems without distribution – though they are most closely associated with Cannes, where reputations can be cemented or dismantled to either rapturous applause from audiences on their feet, or vicious booing.

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or in 2004 following a 20-minute-long standing ovation, while the 22-minute ovation in 2006 for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth remains the longest ever recorded at Cannes. In 2012, the response to Jeff Nichols’ Matthew McConaughey drama Mud clocked in at 18 minutes. Cannes ovations have always been long – but they used to be rare.

In the last few years, it seems that even Croisette ice-cream vendors could garner some form of standing ovation, so frequent are these displays. Some point to the effects of the pandemic, and a deeper, post-Covid appreciation for the communal experience of cinemagoing, while others are beginning to draw a connection to heightened media coverage of world premiere screenings.

“It’s a self-perpetuating machine between the festival, the [US] trades and the audiences,” says Kent Sanderson, president of US indie distributor Bleecker Street.

In May, 15 of the 22 Cannes Competition titles – this year’s roster included films such as Demi Moore-led The Substance and Donald Trump movie The Apprentice – received some form of reportage from their world premieres by at least one of the Hollywood trades (many from all three), with the duration of the standing ovation squarely in the headline. All but one of the seven films that didn’t were non-English-language films without A-list talent.

“The standing ovation [happens] because the audience knows – or has been promised – that the talent is in the room, and they’re showing that love for people who are in their sight line,” says Barry Hertz, film editor and critic for Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail.

But ovations are now “in danger of becoming the new star rating system,” he adds. “Instead of a film getting four stars, it got a ‘10-minute standing ovation’.” Marketing departments haven’t quite reached the point of sticking “20-minute standing ovation” to the top of a poster. “But it’s getting there,” says Hertz.

“No one takes it seriously”

“The whole thing has jumped the shark, and it’s become a caricature of itself,” says one exasperated PR boss in Los Angeles, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to their close relationship with the US trades. “Everybody in the industry gets the joke – even the buyers – and nobody is taking it seriously.”

The veteran PR is among many who point to the discrepancies in the reporting of standing ovations. Some outlets begin timing when the lights go on, while others start at the first applause or when people rise from their seats. Without some uniform criteria, “[ovations] all have different runtimes, which takes the credibility out of it,” they note.

The source also points out the role of the director or actors in attendance, with big names tending to draw more attention. “I’ve seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and it shouldn’t have gotten any ovation, in my opinion,” they note. 

Coppola’s self-financed sci-fi epic split Cannes critics in May, and currently carries an anaemic 56% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Regardless, it still received a seven-minute (according to Deadline and Variety) or 10-minute (The Hollywood Reporter’s verdict) standing ovation at its premiere.

Then, there’s the reality that festivals like Cannes are more forgiving than they used to be. Most people interviewed for this story struggle to remember the last time a film was booed at a public screening. (Lars von Trier’s 2018 serial killer drama The House That Jack Built, starring Matt Dillon, appears to be one of the most recent entries.)

In fact, long-time Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux, who can often be spotted in the auditorium waving his arms and egging on the audience, has said he considers curating standing ovations to be “part of [his] job”.

When asked about ovation coverage in 2022, Fremaux told Indiewire: “I pay attention to the screening, how long to keep the room in the dark, whether to cut the credits or not, the best moment to turn on the light, et cetera. Every screening is a celebration, and the participation of the audience makes that celebration much better. People want to participate!”

Cannes’ fiercest competitor, the Venice Film Festival, is beginning to trade in audience participation too. Now an established awards kingmaker, Venice increasingly plays host to standing ovations. The spotlight on the Sala Grande balcony – the site of the forensically analysed “Spit-gate” of the Don’t Worry Darling media circus in 2022 – has virtually become as notorious as the Grand Palais’ roaming camera.

One public-facing fall festival that has yet to stand and deliver is Toronto.

“The trades tried to make standing ovation timings a thing at TIFF in 2022 and 2023, but I don’t think we were having it,” says The Globe and Mail’s Hertz. “It’s not becoming common, and there are no expectations [that it will].”

Toronto audiences – who vote for the festival’s popular Oscars bellwether, the People’s Choice Award – have a reputation for being enthusiastic and engaged. “But not to the level where we rise to our feet with excitement,” says Hertz, who will this year mark his 18th edition of TIFF. “We’re cheerleaders, we’re supporters… but it’s a polite reception. We don’t lose our minds, or stand for minutes on end.”

Whenever there is some exuberance within the audience, he adds, it’s “almost exclusively” driven by someone from the production or studio.

The current wave of ovation stories, says Hertz, is “purely the invention of the trades that has migrated from the European film circuit over to North America.” Local press have no interest in picking up the mantle, and Hertz, too, refuses to report on it. “I don’t think it deserves that kind of attention.”

The PR source says that fierce competition between the three US trades, all of which are owned by Penske Media Corporation, is likely fuelling the fire of ovation coverage. “If one of them does a [story], and the others don’t, it’s like, ‘We need to do that, too,’” says the source. “That’s the herd mentality that I have to manage sometimes.”

The source notes that premiere-focused articles also allow another bite at the coverage of a film. Unlike a review, which is embargoed until the world premiere, they sit independently and provide an alternative, softer angle.

“These articles are not breaking any embargoes or being critical of a film, but people can read and judge for themselves that one film got eight minutes, while another got 12,” explains the source. “It’s a soft check on the reaction of a film that won’t piss anybody off [on the film team], unlike a review.”

The issue, says Hertz, is that the length of a standing ovation “is no real marker of quality” – yet it’s sometimes construed as such.

In Venice, for example, spectators were quick to observe that Tim Burton’s long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel received “only” a three-minute ovation, and made immediate assumptions about the quality of the movie.

“That’s the film festival equivalent of subdued but polite applause,” wrote one X user. Another announced: “Four-minute ovation – bad; 10-minute ovation – good.” (One US trade is even beginning to time quotients, with this breathless headline following the premiere of Halina Reijn’s Babygirl: “Nicole Kidman’s sweaty, sexy ‘Babygirl’ Makes Venice Climax To 6.5-Minute Standing Ovation”.)

“[Ovations] are a simplified metric to share and spread across social media – and people just pick it up,” says Hertz. And sometimes, to the detriment of films, they can “respond without really understanding the environments they occurred in or the habitual regularity of such standing ovations.”

Giant stopwatches

In recent years, it’s been mooted some film teams likely have a hand in elongating their own standing ovations for the sake of a good headline. It’s not unusual, for example, to see a director or actor hamming it up for the audience to keep the momentum going (even though, most of the time, they look like they couldn’t hit the afterparty soon enough). But how important are standing ovations to publicity and marketing teams?

Michael Arnon, a partner with the Berlin-headquartered PR and marketing firm Wolf, says he’s seen publicists with “giant stopwatches with glowing screens” independently timing ovations at film premieres.

“I don’t have one of those watches, and I’m not that person,” says Arnon, who has led campaigns for films such as Iceland’s 2022 Oscar contender Lamb. But he acknowledges any good PR or marketing executive needs to pay attention to the mood of a screening. “An exceptionally long standing ovation may be part of that,” he allows. However, using ovations in promotional materials “isn’t one of the most interesting or effective ways to market a movie”.

A 15-minute ovation will rarely counteract bad reviews, observes Arnon. “Real criticism related to the substance of the film will still carry the day,” he says. “Ovations might be something that people talk about for a couple of days after the screening, but it’s not something that will affect the destiny and career of the film.”

Similarly, the PR source says that while even their high-profile clients may “care” in the cinema and hope that they receive a warm ovation, they’re not fixated on it. “They don’t call me and say, ‘I want you to use this as a talking point when we talk about my company or the movie,’” explains the source. “I’ve never put a long standing ovation into a corporate profile to prop up their bona fides.”

Karina Gechtman, VP of international marketing and publicity at financing and sales outfit Anton, observes ovations are merely a “piece of the complete picture”.

“It’s valid for it to be part of the conversation, but I would never put it in the marketing material,” says the former Altitude Entertainment executive. “Most industry people that hear about standing ovations in trade headlines can see through them. We all take them with a pinch of salt.”

Interestingly, those with the most visceral reactions to the ovation trend tend to be buyers, who repeatedly highlight how a standing ovation no longer means anything to them because they occur so regularly.

“They’ve become a bit silly and contrived,” says Eve Gabereau, founder and CEO of the London-based distributor Modern Films. “A real standing ovation is wonderful and emotional. Now, it feels like there could be a clock timing it for everyone and a scoreboard. They’re no longer memorable, unless you can really feel the emotion.”

Bleecker Street’s Sanderson, meanwhile, says, “Measuring [ovations] is deeply silly, and doesn’t indicate one thing or another.” The long-time acquisitions executive, who was promoted to president of the Captain Fantastic and The Return distributor earlier this year, warns that there are “starting to be some cracks in the façade of how important those things are.”

Adds Sanderson: “People are noticing how inconsistent it is across trades. They’re starting to take it a little bit less seriously.”

Does a very long ovation for a film influence Bleecker Street’s buying strategy out of a festival? “Not even a little bit,” he says.

So, if publicists rankle at the idea of referencing ovations in their press releases; marketers avoid highlighting them in their promotional materials; and buyers eschew ovations as a legitimate metric to inform their acquisitions, why are standing ovations still dominating headlines?

Aside from generating web traffic for media outlets, it may be as simple as maintaining morale in a period where making anything even remotely risky and original, from a financial point of view, is increasingly challenged.

“It’s a group of people – sometimes thousands of people – that gather together to watch something,” says Anton’s Gechtman. “It’s very powerful. And being in those standing ovations, you feel the energy. That’s great for the film team.”

Sanderson provides the example of the Cannes world premiere of Guy Maddin’s Bleecker Street-distributed Rumours, starring Cate Blanchett.

The executive dreaded getting up and doing “the standing ovation thing,” but “it meant a lot to me when the camera focused on Guy, who’s been doing this for decades and decades,” he recalls. “This was his big moment, and it was nice to see him up on screen with his grandkids, with tears in his eyes. That was positive.”

A film may not go on to do particularly well critically or commercially, but at the festival – at least for a moment – it stands pretty.

“It’s something fun to talk about, whether or not the movie is celebrated in a concrete way in terms of the eventual box office,” says Sanderson. “It’s celebrating the uniqueness of being at a film festival in a way that you can write about, and write about consistently.”

Journalists such as The Globe and Mail’s Hertz, however, warn that a “consistent” stream of articles noting ovations should take pains to avoid conflating a time stamp with a movie’s contribution to the medium. 

“Show your support, show your enthusiasm,” encourages Hertz. “But we, as the press and the industry, should really take a step back from glomming on to that as the start and stop of a film’s value.”

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