The Japan IP Market will return to Cannes on 14–15 May 2027, the Marché du Film and TIFFCOM, the content market of the Tokyo International Film Festival, said on Thursday 29 October. The two markets will co-organise the event for a second year, after a first edition on 15–17 May 2026 that put Japanese rights holders such as Kadokawa, Shochiku and Toei in front of international producers and buyers.
Key facts
- Second edition: 14–15 May 2027, during the Marché du Film at the Festival de Cannes
- First edition: May 2026, part of Japan’s year as Country of Honour at the Marché
- 2026 format: pitch sessions, targeted one-to-one meetings and industry talks
- Participating companies and the 2027 programme are still to be announced
From a one-off to a fixture
The market began as one strand of Japan’s Country of Honour programme at the Marché this year. Speakers at the first edition included Tetsu Fujimura, executive producer of One Piece and founder of the production company Filosophia. The renewal was announced in Tokyo during a TIFFCOM panel on building partnerships with Japan after the Country of Honour year, with Alexandra Zakharchenko, head of industry programmes at the Marché, among the speakers. TIFFCOM counted more than 80 one-to-one meetings at the first edition; neither organiser has said whether any adaptation or acquisition deals followed.
Guillaume Esmiol, executive director of the Marché, called the market one of the outcomes of Japan’s Country of Honour year, and said the aim was to help Japanese rights holders find partners for new adaptations. Zakharchenko said the goal was to turn international interest in Japanese material into “concrete adaptation deals and acquisitions”.
Kaori Ikeda, managing director of TIFFCOM, presented the arrangement as a pair: Cannes in May and the Tokyo IP Market at TIFFCOM in October. Yasushi Shiina, executive adviser at UNIJAPAN and chief executive of TIFFCOM, thanked the Marché for co-organising the event again.
Japan’s government has been pushing support for local film, and producers have been lobbying for incentive reform to bring more international shoots to the country. For more from this year’s Tokyo festival, see our report on the Tokyo jury’s co-production talk.
Our reading
The renewal matters less for its two days in Cannes than for the calendar it creates. Rights holders now get two set dates a year, May on the Croisette and October in Tokyo, to put manga, novels and film remake rights in front of the same group of international producers. That makes it easier to follow up a first meeting with a second one, which is often where an option deal is actually agreed.
For European and American producers, what changes is access. Large Japanese publishers and studios have long been hard to approach without a local partner, and a curated market with booked meetings lowers that barrier. The open question is what came out of the first edition. Those results, and the 2027 participant list, are what will show whether the event is producing business or just meetings.