Venice Film Festival 2025 Lineup: Snubs, Surprises, Highlights

Early Tuesday morning, the Venice Film Festival announced the lineup for its 82nd edition featuring a range of films set to make waves internationally the rest of the year. While many of the competition titles were predicted by IndieWire and others ahead of the official announcement on the morning of July 22, the overall list of films and filmmakers in attendance still offered plenty of surprises.

Below, we dive into what stood out about the lineup, whether it was which films and studios are not participating this time around, to the ways in which this group of Venice entries differs from the ones from last year.

No Warner Bros. Pictures

While there are other studios that are not taking some expected features to Venice, like Focus Features with “Hamnet” or Sony with “Klara and the Sun,” the studio most noticeably absent from any part of the Venice schedule is Warner Bros. Pictures. Though the studio has skipped the festival as recently as two years ago, the studio has typically used Venice as a launchpad for several big releases that ended up topping the box office, like “Dune,” “Don’t Worry Darling,” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (last year’s festival opener).

While some posit that the WB absence may stem from “Joker: Folie à Deux” failing to live up to the expectations of its Golden Lion winning predecessor (to put it mildly), the real answer as to why their major fall prestige release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” is not coming to the festival seems to simply be that the director has no interest in taking his film to festivals. Though his 2012 film “The Master” was a Venice competition title, Anderson’s last feature to premiere at any film festival was “Inherent Vice” in 2014. 

Way Fewer Acquisition Titles

On the other side of the equation, the studio with the biggest presence at Venice will be Netflix, which has three titles in the Competition lineup alone (“Frankenstein,” “A House of Dynamite,” and “Jay Kelly”). While that same lineup was mostly acquisition titles last year, the majority of American films playing in competition, from “Bugonia” to “Father Mother Sister Brother” to “The Smashing Machine” all have distribution in the United States already.

The most notable exception is Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee” starring Amanda Seyfried, though many expect it to be on A24’s radar after the success it had with Fastvold and her husband and collaborator Brady Corbet on their film “The Brutalist,” which A24 bought out of Venice last year.

A New Set of International Feature Contenders

Both the competition lineup and elsewhere feature several filmmakers that have been in the mix for the Best International Feature Oscar before, including Paolo Sorrentino, of Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty” fame, who will be opening the Italy-based film festival with his latest, “The Grace.”

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, who was most recently a Best Documentary Feature nominee with “Four Daughters,” also has “The Voice of Hind Rajab” in competition.

And South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, often cited as an example of a director egregiously snubbed by the Academy, is back in competition as well with “No Other Choice,” after his last film “Decision to Leave” fell just short of an International Feature nomination.

More Major Directors Than Expected

The 2025 edition of the Venice Film Festival has an Out of Competition lineup that seems just as starry as the competition, and in a way that was not previously anticipated. For instance, it is a surprise that one year after “Queer” was in competition, Luca Guadagnino and Amazon MGM Studios have opted out of that with his latest film “After the Hunt,” starring Oscar winner Julia Roberts. Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant, who has had two films in competition at Venice before, also opted out with his latest film “Dead Man’s Wire,” an acquisition title.

Though documentarian Laura Poitras won the Golden Lion for her last film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” her latest project “Cover-Up,” co-directed with journalist Mark Obenhaus, is also screening out of competition, though that is more characteristic of documentaries in general. Sofia Coppola, whose last film “Priscilla” also won an award at Venice 2023, is back with a new documentary “Marc by Sofia.” And even more of a curveball is Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman on the Out of Competition lineup with his new short film “How to Shoot a Ghost.”

Running Times Remain a Pain Point

One of the biggest talking points of the Venice 2024 lineup was the excess of films in excess of a 150-minute running time, with the aforementioned “The Brutalist,” being the prime example at over three hours, with an intermission.

While a film’s running time does not exactly hurt its chances in the competition, festival chief Alberto Barbera has pointed out that it makes a film more difficult to program, as Venice and other festivals often have a robust daily lineup for attendees to work their schedules around.

Though there are a couple of films in competition that are currently longer than two and a half hours, like “Frankenstein,” Barbera also shared during the lineup announcement that Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hand of Dante” is screening out of competition simply because it is longer than they had initially agreed upon.