Nobody will even try to pretend that Cannes Lions, the international festival of creativity that takes over the Croisette every year, isn’t the hottest ticket in town for all sorts of industries – from advertising, media and entertainment, as well as talent agencies, music and culture, to technology of all sorts.
But Monday’s opening day of the 2026 edition raised the temperature in more ways than one. Not only were excited fans sharing news that they had spotted such stars as Alan Cumming around the Croisette soon after Eddy Cue, Apple‘s senior VP of services and the Cannes Lions Entertainment Person of the Year 2026, and Hollywood power producer Jerry Bruckheimer shared the stage at the Lumière Theatre in the Cannes Palais des Festival for a well-attended keynote seminar.
No, the heat was also literal amid a heatwave currently hitting large parts of France. The temperature handily topped the 30 degrees Celsius mark, hitting around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The result was that every Cannes Lions indoor session you went to on Monday was full of folks expressing their relief to have found – at least temporary – refuge in the air-conditioned event spaces of the Palais. “I may stay in here for a few more sessions,” one attendee quipped after a midday discussion in a cooled-down room at the Palasi.
