There’s no shortage of anxiety in Hollywood over the future of film. Americans are staying home on their couches more and more—a trend encouraged by Amazon and Netflix streaming, as well as studios shortening the window before movies become available on-demand.
 
Now film festivals too are showing signs of this disruption. That’s certainly evident at the Tribeca Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. Sure, it will still host the requisite number of movie premieres (“Dog Years,” “Aardvark,” “Dabka” and “The Lovers” are among those to watch for). But it is also spotlighting television shows, video games and virtual reality experiences. As Tribeca’s Executive Vice President Patty Newburger summed it up for us at ZEITUIDE, “Tribeca Film Festival is screen agnostic.”
 
The Tribeca, Sundance and Toronto film festivals all added virtual reality components in 2016. Tribeca’s Virtual Arcade is back this year with 29 exhibits. The Cannes Film Festival will also have its first official VR selection this year: “Virtually Present, Physically Invisible,” a collaboration between Oscar winners Alejandro Inarritu and Emmanuel Lubezki, intended to shine a light on the experience of immigrants and refugees.
 
Cannes is also following Tribeca’s lead in adding TV series to its roster. TribecaTV will offer sneak peeks of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and NatGeo’s “Genius,” a scripted series about Einstein from producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Cannes festival goers will be the first to see David Lynch’s super-secretive “Twin Peaks” revival and season two of Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake” series. “We’re not going to start debating here the fact that even [television] series, unless proven otherwise, are using the classical art of filmmaking and of cinematic narration,” said festival director Thierry Frémaux.
 
The new-this-year Tribeca Games Festival is ahead of the curve. This two-day festival-within-the-festival is intended to bring attention to the best storytellers working in video game platforms. (The keynote speaker will be Hideo Kojima, who 30 years ago created the Metal Gear franchise). Some of the most anticipated game titles of 2017 will also get their own “premiere,” including a crowd play of the new Guardians of the Galaxy game.
 
This shift to diversify film festival programming is an acknowledgement of how boundaries between forms of entertainment media are dissolving. Writers, directors and actors jump from film to broadcast to online. Viewers jump from YouTube to a streaming movie to a videogame without leaving the sofa. To stay relevant, festivals are going to have to take a more open-minded approach to celebrating creativity and storytelling rather than venerating our history of sitting in a darkened theater with strangers.