The Ben Stiller-starring dramedy Nutcrackers was announced on Tuesday as the opening-night movie for this year's Toronto International Film Festival.Nutcracker Productions LLC/Supplied
If there is one constant to an opening-night film at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s that there is no constant.
Over the years, TIFF has kicked things off with everything from a dreamy animated film from a Japanese master (last year’s The Boy and the Heron) to a bland ripped-from-the-headlines biopic (2022′s The Swimmers) to a raucous concert documentary (2020′s American Utopia) to maligned musicals (2021′s Dear Evan Hansen and 2010′s Score: A Hockey Musical, the latter of which the festival will never, ever live down). Trying to successfully guess the prestige and pedigree of what might open any given edition of TIFF is an impossible game to win.
All of which makes this year’s opening-night selection of the new Ben Stiller-starring dramedy Nutcrackers, as announced by programmers Tuesday, both a surprising head-scratcher and a stealthily perfect choice.
On the one hand, the film’s logline – a straitlaced workaholic named Mike (Stiller) is suddenly thrust into being a caregiver for his orphaned nephews – promises the kind of crowd-pleasing affair that TIFF is known for. And the world premiere, which marks Stiller’s first lead role in six years, marks a homecoming of sorts, too. The actor’s last movie as a leading man, the 2017 comedy Brad’s Status, also debuted in Toronto.
The actor, whose red-carpet presence will help TIFF bounce back from last year’s actors’ strike-plagued festival, is also currently enjoying the best reviews of his career. At least, behind the camera, thanks to Stiller’s directing and producing duties on the acclaimed Apple TV+ series Severance, whose long-awaited second season arrives in January. On the other hand, there has been minimal buzz for Nutcrackers, which is directed by David Gordon Green, who is just coming off the worst reviews of his career for The Exorcist: Believer.
Another curious wrinkle is the fact that Nutcrackers is coming to TIFF without a studio or distributor already attached, with UTA Independent Film Group acting as the film’s sales agent. That would make the movie the first acquisitions title to open TIFF since 2009, when the Charles Darwin biopic Creation launched the festival. (The U2 doc From the Sky Down lacked a North American distributor when it was selected to open TIFF in 2011, though its U.S. rights were acquired by Showtime two days before it premiered.)
Yet Nutcrackers’ current lack of distribution makes it a subtly sly opening-night choice, given TIFF’s ambitions as an organization. Earlier this spring, festival organizers announced plans to launch what they say will be a “game-changing” official content market in 2026, an initiative made possible thanks to $23-million in funding from the federal government. If Nutcrackers lands a big distribution deal coming off of its TIFF debut, then the festival will have just one more bargaining chip in its hands to convince the global film industry that it can serve as the premiere North American hub for buying and selling movies.
Nutcrackers is the 12th film to be confirmed for this year’s TIFF so far, joining such previously announced titles as the Amy Adams comedy Nightbitch, the animated family drama The Wild Robot, the Indigenous basketball drama Rez Ball and the documentary Elton John: Never Too Late.
This year’s edition of TIFF will run Sept. 5 through 15, with more programming to be announced over the coming weeks.