TIFF Just Closed Voting on Its Most Predictive Award and Will Never Tell You the Score
Voting for TIFF's People's Choice Award closed at 4am. The festival has never published a single vote total in fifty-one editions — and the Oscar statistic attached to the prize counts films that did not win it.
The ballot closed at four in the morning Toronto time. Somewhere in a system nobody outside the Toronto International Film Festival has ever seen, a winner now exists, and it will not be named until Sunday.
Between now and then, expect to read that a film won in a landslide, or squeaked through, or was never really in contention. None of that is knowable. TIFF has never published a vote total, a margin, or a per-film count, for any edition, ever. It publishes a winner and two runners-up and nothing else.
The one thing that is known about the counting
Not nothing, in fairness. The mechanism itself is on the record, from a newspaper investigation into the award nearly a decade ago: ballots are cast online, voter emails are cross-referenced against ticket registrations, and — this is the part that matters — the raw vote count for each film is weighted against the size of the audience that saw it.
Which means a film playing a 300-seat house with an ecstatic crowd can beat a film that played Roy Thomson Hall to two thousand people and collected four times as many votes. The prize is not a popularity contest. It is an enthusiasm ratio.
TIFF's own voting page says nothing about any of this. It explains how the festival prevents ballot-stuffing and stops there.
The twenty Best Picture nominations that are not what they sound like
The statistic attached to this award every September is that its winners have gone on to twenty Best Picture nominations. It is reproducible, it is accurate, and it is doing something quietly different from what it appears to do.
The stat counts the winner and both runners-up — thirty films across ten years, not ten.
- Thirty films, twenty Best Picture nominations. That is the number in circulation, and the arithmetic checks: two in 2015, two in 2016, two in 2017, two in 2018, three in 2019, one in 2020, two in 2021, two in 2022, two in 2023, two in 2024.
- Ten winners, nine Best Picture nominations. Room, La La Land, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Green Book, Jojo Rabbit, Nomadland, Belfast, The Fabelmans and American Fiction all got there. The Life of Chuck did not.
Nine out of ten is a remarkable hit rate for an audience prize. It is also less impressive-sounding than twenty, which is presumably why twenty is the figure the festival supplies.
What is actually in the field
From the coverage on the ground rather than from any published tally, three titles keep recurring:
- The Debut, Jesse Eisenberg's second feature, described as the closest thing Toronto had to a critical and audience favourite at once, sitting at 88 on Metacritic. It is also in competition at San Sebastian, which opens tomorrow — a film chasing an audience prize in Canada and a jury prize in Spain in the same week.
- Being Heumann, Sian Heder's film, repeatedly called a quintessential audience movie, which in People's Choice terms is the highest compliment available.
- I Play Rocky, Peter Farrelly's Stallone origin picture, which reportedly played to a thunderous room while sitting in the sixties on Metacritic. Under a weighted system, the room is what counts.
Four audience prizes, and one of them is not new
TIFF now hands out four audience-voted awards: People's Choice, People's Choice Documentary, People's Choice Midnight Madness, and the International People's Choice Award.
The last of those will be described somewhere this weekend as a new addition. It was inaugurated in 2025. This is its second edition.
Dates and things not known
- Voting ran from 7 September at noon to 17 September at 4am, Eastern time, at the festival's own ballot page.
- Winners across all juried and audience categories are announced on Sunday 20 September, the closing day of the 51st edition, by press conference and livestream.
- The weighting method rests on a single 2017 newspaper report. TIFF has never confirmed the arithmetic, and the exact formula is unpublished.
- No vote totals will be released on Sunday either. There is no indication the festival has ever considered it.
A prize that predicts the Oscars without showing its working
There is something faintly absurd about an award whose entire authority rests on a decade of near-perfect Oscar correlation, and which will not tell anyone how many people voted for anything.
It works because it works. Nine of the last ten winners went on to Best Picture nominations, and the audience that produced that record is a self-selecting crowd of people who bought tickets to a film festival and filled in a form afterwards. That is not a representative sample of anything. It is, apparently, a very good one.
On Sunday a name arrives with no numbers attached. Whatever gets written about the margin will be invention, and by Monday it will read like reporting.