EXCLUSIVE: The Toronto International Film Festival is going deeper into TV and making Primetime bigger. The Festival has a TV section called Primetime and TIFF execs told Deadline they plan to increase the selection by 40% for 2026.
Appropriately, the news came out of MIPCOM, the Cannes TV market that’s running this week. The setting was fitting, as TIFF was on the ground meeting the TV industry ahead of next year’s launch of TIFF – The Market.
TIFF and Deadline hosted drinks with buyers and distributors and we caught up with the TIFF execs in town, Judy Lung VP, Strategy, Communications & Stakeholder Relations and Geoff Macnaughton, VP of Industry and Theatrical Programming.
Macnaughton told us that the Primetime section he oversees will expand by 40%, featuring approximately 14 series next year.
This year’s Primetime lineup had six world premieres including The Lowdown, which opened the section, Netflix’s Mae Martin series Wayward, Black Rabbit starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman, and Origin: The Story of the Basketball Africa League, which was the only documentary series in the lineup.
Macnaughton told guests at the TIFF-Deadline reception that several of this year’s Primetime shows racked up sales after their TIFF showing. That’s an important point for the MIPCOM crowd, notably as TIFF readies the launch of its own market in 2026.
TIFF The Market will span TV, film and next-generation content and is a notable new addition to the calendar. “This year, our 50th has been a really exciting opportunity to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also to look ahead and ignite our vision for the next 50 years and beyond,” Lung said. “This vision for the future is centered around a commitment to deepening TIFF’s support of the global entertainment business, including the launch of an official content market at the Festival next September.”
Macnaughton added: “We are always looking for series that are things we have never seen before, and that are going to surprise people, but also [projects] that are looking for distribution. And we’re leaning into this idea of designing a content market and building not only what we do in the film side of things, but also growing what we do in the series side, that’s really important to us.”
TIFF: The Market will run September 10 through 16. The venue is TBC, but as it comes together TIFF has assembled a committee of industry advisors including TV execs from BBC Studios and Blue Ant.
