'Camp Miasma' Won a Cannes Prize and a 95% Score. Ticket Sales: $4.3 Million.

A slasher that won a prize at Cannes and carries a 95 percent critics' score has taken $4.3 million at the box office. The score is Rotten Tomatoes' tally of 252 reviews; the gross is Box Office Mojo's count, both credited on the film's Wikipedia entry. What the distributor spent on marketing, and what the title earns outside theaters, appears in neither tally.

The film is Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It opened the Un Certain Regard section at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival in May. It won the Queer Palm there, which Screen Daily reported on May 22, 2026. Mubi put it in limited United States theaters on August 7, 2026. The distributor expanded it on August 14 and went wider on August 21.

Why it lands on a Los Angeles desk: this is a Plan B Entertainment production, from the company Brad Pitt co-founded, playing in the same rooms that decide whether the next one like it gets financed. A critical consensus is not a mood. It is an input.

What a 95 actually measures

My take: near-unanimity is information about critics, not about a movie. Rotten Tomatoes' figure describes how many of 252 reviewers filed something the site read as positive. The average rating sitting under it is 8.3 out of 10. Metacritic scores the film 89 out of 100. That weighted number comes from 48 critics, and it sits in the band the site labels universal acclaim.

Read the blurbs in a row and a house style comes into focus. Rotten Tomatoes' own consensus line pairs the film's style with its warmth. Robbie Collin of The Telegraph gave it five stars and called it "extravagantly funny, recklessly bizarre." Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times filed a positive review on August 6, 2026, describing it as a funny, bloody romance built on slasher parts. Individually, recommendations. Stacked, a chorus.

The movie about people who love movies

Consider what the chorus is applauding. The plot, as the record summarizes it, follows a filmmaker hired to reboot a defunct 1980s slasher franchise. She becomes fixated on casting the original film's final girl, quotes camera technique at the screen while watching it, and ends up inside the picture herself.

Schoenbrun described that turn to Time: "She's no longer the person in the audience calling out 'split diopter.' She's the person in the movie who people are going 'split diopter' to." That is a film about cinephile devotion being rewarded, handed to the professional cinephiles who grade it. The compliment lands on the reader of the review as much as on the film.

The comp nobody in the trades wants to run is the picture against itself. Vulture reported a budget of about $10 million, a figure nobody has audited in public. Against that, $4.3 million in tickets is roughly 43 cents back for every budgeted dollar. Theatrical is not the whole business, and nobody has published the rest of it.

I have not seen the film and this column will not pretend otherwise; the judgment here is on the record, not the reel. The narrower claim is the one I'd defend: a score that high measures agreement, and agreement is the cheapest commodity in film criticism. One more thing from the record I read. That Wikipedia entry gives three different Cannes premiere dates:

• May 12
• May 13
• May 21

If the page cannot hold the day still, treat the number stapled beside it with the same care.

Source: en.wikipedia.org, retrieved August 28, 2026.