Although the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival is still more than a month away, the drama surrounding the marquee movie industry event is already heating up.

With the first batch of TIFF 2014 titles announced earlier this week, industry experts have started weighing in on what the preliminary lineup says about the state of the world’s leading public film fest. Many in the film industry believe that TIFF’s new premiere policy is going to hurt the event this year.

The aggressive new policy says that only films that are World or North American premieres can screen during the first four days of the festival. That policy came in response to the rival Telluride Film Festival pulling the rug out from underneath TIFF several times in recent years, holding unofficial screenings of movies like "The King's Speech," "Argo," and "12 Years a Slave" a week before they were set to debut in Toronto. These screenings undercut the prestige TIFF would have received from premiering these future Oscar-winning films.

Speaking with Toronto Star film critic Peter Howell last month, Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard said that TIFF’s new policy could “damage the festival” by making studios and filmmakers choose between the two events.

“They seem to be losing their point of view about being a filmmaker-friendly festival ... to sort of put a blockade up against a small festival in the mountains seems a bit imperialistic,” Bernard said.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg also believes that Toronto’s “our way or the highway” approach may be hurting the festival. According to Feinberg, studios and filmmakers are picking sides in the TIFF-Telluride tiff, a situation that is far more damaging to the Canadian festival.

"The widespread feeling among the distributors and filmmakers with whom I spoke seems to be that Toronto's organizers have allowed their pride and egos to influence their policymaking, hurting films, filmmakers and their own event in the process," Feinberg wrote.

Feinberg noted that while Toronto favourites like David Cronenberg (“Maps to the Stars”), Jason Reitman “(Men, Women and Children”) and Noah Baumbach (“While We're Young”) are skipping Telluride and premiering their latest films at TIFF 2014, other filmmakers who’ve previously found success at TIFF (most notably Quebec’s own Jean-Marc Vallee) have opted to bring their films to the Colorado-based event first and take a later slot at TIFF -- or even skip Toronto completely.

It's very possible that TIFF's new approach to premieres may have cost it high-profile films like David Fincher's "Gone Girl" and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Birdman," which are headed to the New York and Venice Film Festivals instead of Toronto. Only a small fraction of the TIFF 2014 lineup has been announced so far, but it's clear that the new policy may not be having the desired effect.

As Toronto has grown in both size and profile over the past decade or so, the festival has become an attractive launch pad for Hollywood movies aiming for awards season glory. Numerous Best Picture-winning films began their road to the Oscars at TIFF. However, with around 300 films screening at the fest every year some movies - even big ones - can get lost in the red carpet shuffle.

That’s part of the reason why studios and filmmakers are opting to take their films to the smaller and more low-key Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. They may perceive that festival as being more about the movies and less about the glitz, glamour, and celebrity spectacle that TIFF has embraced over the years.

What was meant to make Toronto more exclusive and prestigious may simply be driving studios and filmmakers to look for a smaller spotlight elsewhere rather than get caught up in the madness that is the Toronto International Film Festival.