Ted Sarandos is in a prickly spot. The Netflix boss is posing for a photograph between four enormous cacti in the garden of the company’s villa at the Cannes Film Festival: he’s doing his best to smile – the closest he gets is a look of what might be described as clenched satisfaction – even though jaggy discomfort looms on all sides.

Just a few weeks ago, Sarandos might have assumed he’d have been welcomed on the Croisette with open arms. Not only did his company produce two of the films in contention for this year’s Palme d’Or: Bong Joon-ho’s monster fable Okja and Noah Baumbach’s New York-set family comedy The Meyerowitz Stories. But over the last four years, they’ve become a major new investor – alongside their streaming service fellow-travellers Amazon Prime – in the global independent cinema scene, while Hollywood’s studios take refuge in franchise and formula like never before.

Instead, their arrival has precipitated the festival’s biggest bona fide scandal in years. Thanks to a French law that prohibits films from streaming online for three years after their theatrical run, Netflix has opted not to release any of their original films in French cinemas. (In the UK, where no such law exists, their Cannes films will receive limited theatrical runs before going live on the service the following week.)