Tom Cruise, Reece Feldman’s Premiere

TikTok creators got the surprise of their lives during the first week of Cannes Film Festival, when Tom Cruise showed up to give a talk on his new film “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” ahead of its premiere.

The 34 film-centric creators, who TikTok invited to the festival from across the globe, thought they were just coming to the platform’s festival hub at the J.W. Marriott for a content creation workshop — until Cruise came out of nowhere. In partnership with Paramount, Cruise gave a 20-minute fireside chat with creator Reece Feldman (@guywithamoviecamera on the platform) and then hung around for about an hour after to have one-on-one conversations with as many of the TikTokers as possible.

“I’ve never asked permission to create,” Cruise told the room. “Actors and filmmakers and businessmen say, ‘What should I do?’ Do it. Learn it, apply it and don’t wait to know everything. The only way to learn is to go jump in, and don’t worry about making mistakes.”

For TikTok’s EMEA head of content operations Marlène Masure, the time with Cruise underlines just how valuable TikTok has become not just as an official partner of the festival, but within the film industry as a whole.

“Having two hours in Tom Cruise’s agenda is a testament to the power of our movie community and how important they are,” she told Variety during the festival, adding: “I hope that this will inspire other studios to give bigger access to creators to top talents.”

Indeed, TikTok’s presence at the festival this year felt larger than ever, with several events and activations taking place. The platform had its own party, an industry brunch where Feldman interviewed Daniel Kaluuya about redefining fandom, and hosted a premiere for Feldman’s first short film, “Wait, Your Car?.” For Feldman, who started posting videos on the platform in 2020 of his experience working on the set of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and now has 2.4 million followers, it was a pinch-me moment.

“That was always the dream,” he said of premiering his first project at Cannes. “If I won the lottery at any point in my life, the first thing I was going to do was be like, ‘Alright, let’s sit down, let’s choose one of the scripts I’ve written and let’s get really practical about making this.’”

Having been told about the opportunity in February, Feldman had roughly three months to write, cast, shoot, edit and deliver the short. “Wait, Your Car?,” starring Whitney Peak, Ruby Cruz, Minnie Mills and Noa Fisher, follows four girls whose friendship is put to the test after one of them becomes convinced that her car is trying to kill her. The reception to the short in the Palais was glowing, with the screening room filled to standing-room only. Feldman plans to continue taking the short around the festival circuit in hopes that studios and production companies will take it as “proof of style.”

“It’s showing you how I like to shoot things, the tone, the timing, the tempo, the writing style, the humor,” he said. “So that’s the thing that I’m most excited for people to take away, like, ‘That’s the distinct voice of Reece.’”

Masure sees the Cannes partnership, which started four years ago, as a way to give back to TikTok’s thriving #FilmTok community and provide an inside look at the festival to those on the platform who may be discovering it for the first time. By the second week of the festival, 27,000 videos had been created on TikTok with the hashtag #Cannes2025, up from 22,000 last year, and posts from creators at the festival garnered over 26 million combined views.

“Cannes used to be a bit more restricted to a certain community of moviemakers in the movie industry,” Masure said. “That’s the whole purpose of what we do — provide more visibility to these talents. Everyone creating content on the platform can have a chance to become a great moviemaker.”

Creator and presenter Zainab Jiwa (@zeewhatidid) has seen firsthand the growth in interest regarding the festival with her majority Gen-Z audience. “It’s been a great way to give them access into a space that seems exclusive in a way,” she said. “What I’ve tried to do in every step of my journey is to take the audience with me, because I never had that growing up.”

Jiwa, who went viral last fall for her playful junket interview with Denzel Washington in which he gave life advice, was on hand in the second week of the festival to be the platform’s red carpet host for the premieres of Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” and more. Though Jiwa may be holding a mic and talking to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, she acknowledges that her purpose is different than that of a journalist — many of whom have become frustrated in recent years with lack of access to talent at Cannes and other festivals.

“My aim in an interview in general isn’t to get something out of them,” she said. “I’m not here to find the scoop — my aim is to make them feel comfortable and to just have a chat because that’s what my audience wants.”

Both Jiwa and Feldman are also open about the fact that they partner with studios on many of their conversations. “At the end of the day, I’m biased,” Feldman said. “I’m being hired by these studios, so my opinion is, from the get-go, moot.”

But that doesn’t mean that they’re only asking throwaway questions. In fact, Masure considers conversations between stars like Cruise and creators like Feldman to be more like peer discussions.

“He was very technical,” she said of Feldman’s questions to Cruise, many of which centered around how he pulled off “Mission: Impossible 8’s” crazy stunt work. “I mean, the guy has been working in movie production so he knows a great deal about this. It felt almost like a movie professional to another movie professional.”

Overall, TikTok having a large presence at Cannes just makes practical sense to Feldman, as he sees the film industry and social media as now being “intrinsically tied.”

“I think it’s good to lean into the TikTok of it all,” he said. “It doesn’t mean having to ask talent to do dances — it could really just be hey, here’s how you sign up for the festival.”

He continued: “Social doesn’t have to be used in the most extreme of ways, and TikTok is a place where it’s approachable. I do believe that it acts almost as a public sphere, and I think it’s good that we’re forced to confront voices outside of the ones that we just choose to hear.”