The Toronto International Film Festival closed on Sunday and shifted the early awards-season landscape, most notably elevating La Bola Negra into direct competition with Universal’s The Odyssey for best picture attention. La Bola Negra collected one of TIFF’s longest-standing ovations, won the festival’s overall audience award, and was chosen by Spain as its international feature Oscar entry, marking several high-profile endorsements in a single week.
Festival voters have in recent years tracked closely with Academy tastes, which makes the audience award meaningful even if the prize has not guaranteed Oscar nominations in every case. TIFF’s overall field included other season players such as Searchlight’s Wild Horse Nine and A24’s Club Kid, but those titles did not finish among the top three in the audience balloting. That comparative performance, together with La Bola Negra’s momentum, leads to the assessment that it is, at least for now, the principal challenger to The Odyssey.
Budget contrasts sharpen the rivalry. La Bola Negra reportedly cost less than $15 million while The Odyssey was made on a $250 million budget, reviving the frequent awards-season dynamic where Academy voters sometimes reward smaller, performance-driven films over expensive tentpoles. Past seasons offer precedents for that pattern, including matchups such as Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan, The Hurt Locker and Avatar, Parasite and 1917, and Everything Everywhere All at Once and Top Gun: Maverick.
Toronto also delivered a clear boost to Amazon MGM’s I Play Rocky. Director Peter Farrelly’s dramatization of Sylvester Stallone’s early career drew sustained applause and finished second in the festival’s audience voting. Anthony Ippolito’s lead turn won strong notices, and TIFF’s crowd response echoed the trajectory Green Book followed after its Toronto debut, suggesting the film could carry awards-season interest even if critical and social-media responses split along familiar lines.
Focus Features’ Elsinore emerged as another title to watch. The film earned TIFF’s international audience award, with Andrew Scott’s performance at the center of that enthusiasm. Elsinore holds a high approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and because Scott appears in nearly every scene, the film’s standout lead could override perceptions of any broader shortcomings, a dynamic that has helped other films secure best picture consideration since the Academy expanded the nominee pool.
Collectively, TIFF’s audience verdicts have reoriented early Oscar thinking by elevating a Spanish-language Netflix entry, reaffirming a crowd-pleasing biopic from Farrelly, and spotlighting a performance-driven drama led by Andrew Scott. The festival’s outcomes also prompted the observation that The Odyssey’s team may need to increase public visibility as the season progresses.
