Neon may be the toast of Cannes — again — after landing its seventh consecutive Palme d’Or on Saturday thanks to “Fjord,” but according to Boots Riley, the distributor could have had another hot film in its 2026 lineup.
With the musician and filmmaker’s latest movie “I Love Boosters” having hit cinemas on May 22, Riley has been busy promoting the crime comedy — starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González and LaKeith Stanfield — across social media.
But when asked by someone on X why Neon chose to launch the film at SXSW rather than in Cannes, Riley said that it was down to the French festival, which he claimed had also rejected his previous projects, including his 2018 dark comedy feature debut “Sorry to Bother You” (which bowed in Sundance that year) and 2023 surrealist comedy series “I am a Virgo.”
“Cannes didn’t pick Sorry to Bother You altho they picked other stuff that had been played in their home country,” he wrote. “They picked The Idol over I’m a Virgo. They didn’t pick I Love Boosters.”
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Riley concluded: “They just don’t like my stuff. All good.”
“I Love Boosters,” Riley’s second feature, is a absurdist comic send-up of consumerism, following a Robin Hood-like gang who shoplift high fashion from the rich and then sell it on on for a fraction of the price.
In Variety‘s review, it described the film as an “incendiary prank of a movie” that “begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.”
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Variety has reached out to both the Cannes Film Festival and Neon.