At Cannes 2026 Steven Soderbergh premiered «John Lennon: The Last Interview» as a Special Screening. Roughly 10% of its imagery was generated with Meta’s video tools, and Meta also provided the completion financing when the money ran out. The family’s blessing was a letter from Sean Ono Lennon read aloud in the theatre — not a licence. Economically, that distinction is the whole story.
On 16 May 2026, at the photocall of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh had to explain something directors rarely explain: who paid for the end of his film. The answer was Meta. «Literally, we were running out of money», he told NME. John Lennon: The Last Interview had no budget and no time left; the company supplied two distinct things — generative video tools and completion financing, the money that takes a film from shot footage to a screenable print.
Artificial intelligence accounts for roughly 10% of the film’s imagery. These are Meta’s generative text-to-video models — according to NME, tools not yet publicly released, with no product name disclosed — which produce moving images from written descriptions. Soderbergh told Deadline he used them for «sequences with images impossible to shoot». And that is precisely where it pays to slow down, because a false version of this story has already taken hold.
What is actually in those ten minutes
The most detailed accounts of the screening — CineD, citing Filmmaker — describe abstract, dreamlike material: circles of light, a black rose, split screens. Around ten minutes, in a film variously reported as 97 or 100 minutes long. No reconstruction of Lennon’s face or voice. An AFP dispatch of 11 May, by contrast, wrote that the film contains AI-generated footage of Lennon and Yoko Ono. The two accounts contradict each other, and the second travelled further, because it is the story everyone expected.
Keeping the two scenarios apart matters, because their market price is entirely different. Generating ten minutes of visual abstraction is a technical line item: compute time and artistic supervision. Generating ten minutes of Lennon speaking is an operation on a proprietary asset — personal likeness — which has owners, heirs, licensors and a negotiable value. The first is post-production. The second is rights. Conflating them means missing the economics of this film entirely.
The film rests on a tape, not on a model
Everything here revolves around an unreleased radio interview recorded by Lennon and Ono at the Dakota on 8 December 1980, hours before the killing. Around that tape Soderbergh assembled more than a thousand photographs and archival clips. It is a classic archival documentary, in which the generative material functions as visual connective tissue — the problem every documentarian knows: you have the audio, you don’t have the pictures.
Before the screening, festival president Iris Knobloch read aloud a letter from Sean Ono Lennon. The son told Soderbergh that his father «would have wanted to experiment» with the technology. That is the moment the press seized on, and rightly so: it legitimised the project in front of a room full of professionals, three months after thousands of French actors and filmmakers signed an open letter calling AI a «devouring hydra» — a mobilisation that gives Cannes a specific temperature no other festival has this year.
A letter is not a licence
Here is the argument. The documented consent in this affair is a personal letter read out loud, plus public statements. No licensing agreement with the Lennon estate has been published, and no financial terms of any such arrangement are known. As public narrative, the letter works beautifully: it is warm, it has a named author, it closes the moral question in thirty seconds. For anyone who has to buy, insure or distribute a film, it is not the same thing as a contract.
Before signing, an international distributor asks for a chain of title: who granted what, for which territories, for how long, with what warranties and indemnities. A family blessing answers none of these. Not because it is insincere, but because it is the wrong instrument: it defines no scope, no term, no exclusivity, and says nothing about what happens if another branch of the estate takes a different view next year.
And indeed: at the time of the Cannes presentation, the film had no distributor. International sales were handed to the company 193; no release plan was announced. Deadline had reported that Soderbergh was already looking for buyers back in April 2025. A John Lennon documentary by one of the most recognisable American directors, built around unheard audio, shown at the most watched film showcase on earth — and still homeless at the end of the festival. That is not normal.
Why the market hesitates
The reasons could be many, and no source has spelled them out. But the shape of the problem is legible. A buyer pricing this title has at least three unknowns:
- What Meta got in return. It is not known whether the company holds rights, equity or a recoupment position. Buyers want to know who stands ahead of them in the payment queue.
- How solid the family’s approval is. With a deceased person’s likeness, the question is not «did someone say yes», but «who has the power to say yes, to what, and for how long».
- What the noise costs. A film wearing the «AI» label, in a year when Guillermo del Toro shouted «Fuck AI!» during Cannes Classics, carries a reputational risk that lands in the marketing model.
On that last point the festival walked a fine line. Cannes keeps films «primarily driven by generative AI» out of the competition: a curatorial stance attributed to Thierry Frémaux and Iris Knobloch, not a rule written into the 2026 regulations. A Special Screening does not pass through that filter. Meanwhile, on 11 May, Meta had been announced as a multi-year Official Partner of the festival, succeeding TikTok — partner from 2022 to 2025 — with promotional events tied to Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Frémaux restated the separation: «we keep the economic constraints separate from the artistic side». The sponsorship terms were not disclosed.
The real product on sale
Treating this as a case of post-mortem image ethics misses the most interesting part. Meta did not buy Lennon. It bought something cheaper and much harder to obtain: a demonstration, on a credible stage, that its generative models can enter a respected author’s workflow without the author being embarrassed about it. Ten minutes of abstract imagery in an archival documentary is, in compute terms, almost nothing. In positioning terms it is a case study no advertising campaign can manufacture.
What is missing is the legal structure that would make the operation repeatable. Peter Jackson, at Cannes for the honorary Palme, said he is open even to digitally reconstructing deceased actors, provided the guardians of the estate agree. That position is reasonable and vague in exactly the same way a letter read aloud is. As long as «the guardians agree» remains a moral formula rather than a standard contract with scope, consideration and duration, every project of this kind will have to renegotiate from scratch — and no distributor will know how to insure it.
One detail sums it up better than any analysis: within hours of the announcement, the public conversation moved onto something that, according to the most detailed account available, is not in the film at all. The market for the likeness of the dead already exists in the collective imagination. In the paperwork, it is still almost entirely unwritten.