The Croisette has a way of separating the visiting from the working. Among the actors and producers who actually came to Cannes 2026 with business to do, few had a denser week than Don Worley.

The actor-producer arrived at the festival with three films in the mix: Neil Burger’s high-octane action thriller Barracuda, in which he stars alongside Anthony Mackie and Dafne Keen; the genre-bending holiday horror-comedy Christmas at the Kringles, set for a wide November theatrical release through Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment, in which he also appears; and the one he brought to the market himself, his award-winning indie A Time for Sunset, which took Best Thriller at the Culver City Film Festival and earned a 9/10 from Film Threat, currently streaming on Apple TV and Amazon. He was also a featured panelist at one of the festival’s most-talked-about industry conversations, The Future of Film, hosted by MovieMaker Magazine at La Muse on the beach in the heart of Cannes.

What ties it all together, beyond the man himself, is a working philosophy that has Second Chance Pictures moving faster, and across more formats, than most independent operations its size. The company currently has six projects in active production or pre-production at once, including the upcoming faith-based crime thriller The Tempering starring Angie Harmon (Rizzoli & Isles, Law & Order), which Worley rewrote himself and which is heading into principal photography.

If Barracuda and Kringles establish where Worley already plays in the traditional theatrical space, the bet he’s making on vertical is where he’s playing for what comes next. Worley is producing and acting in a slate of vertical scripted series, the 90-second-to-two-minute mobile-first format that has rapidly become one of entertainment’s most disruptive growth segments. His verticals are cast with names like Tara Reid, Vivica Fox, and Alexis Knapp alongside social media talent who bring their own audiences, a hybrid model major studios are still trying to architect on whiteboards.

“The success of Pastor Shepherd on TikTok made it clear that vertical platforms aren’t just promotional spaces. They’re real storytelling venues with massive audiences,” Worley said earlier this year when announcing his company’s expansion into the format. “You can build characters, grow an audience, and get immediate feedback. That same energy is what we’re bringing into our vertical series.”

The bet is paying off already. In January, Worley revived his cult comedic creation Pastor Shepherd, a televangelist character he originally developed as a YouTube series that later spawned the feature Pastor Shepherd with Danny Trejo. The character’s two TikTok accounts have together generated more than 40 million views and 230,000 shares in a matter of weeks.

The Barracuda role is a reminder of where Worley already plays in the prestige independent space. Directed by Neil Burger (Limitless, The Illusionist) and led by Anthony Mackie (Captain America: Brave New World) and Dafne Keen (Logan, Deadpool & Wolverine), the film follows a former smuggler who rescues a kidnapped teenager from a Mexican nightclub and ignites a 100-mile chase across the desert in a stolen 1973 Plymouth Barracuda. The cast also includes Steven Bauer (Scarface, Ray Donovan) and Anthony Del Negro (Running Point). Highland Film Group is handling worldwide rights, with Amazon already locked in for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, alongside a long list of international territory deals. Production has been underway in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Christmas at the Kringles, meanwhile, lands later this year as a wide theatrical release from Briarcliff. Directed by Kevin Lewis, whose Nicolas Cage-led Willy’s Wonderland became a cult favorite, the action-horror-comedy stars Ron Livingston, Rachel Bilson, Rob Riggle, Beverly D’Angelo, Thomas Lennon, and Donald Faison, with Worley in the ensemble. Briarcliff, the Ortenberg-led indie distributor behind Spotlight, Crash, Monster’s Ball, and The Apprentice, has set it for a November 20 nationwide release.

The Cannes panel itself, The Future of Film, brought Worley together with MovieMaker Editor-in-Chief Tim Molloy, actress-producer Jaime King, and Weazl Sauce producer Fernando Ferro for a frank conversation on what it will take to build a more sustainable model for the industry: AI, vertical storytelling, financing, distribution, and the audience behaviors quietly reshaping all of it. For Worley, the seat at that table was the visible version of the work he’s been doing all year, building a presence that touches every corner of where the business is moving.

He won’t be in town long. He is currently in production on an untitled feature shooting in South Africa, and travels next to Canada for a leading role in another project, before returning to Los Angeles to continue producing and starring in additional features through Second Chance Pictures. Beyond the announced slate, additional features, television projects, and vertical series are in development at the company, positioning Worley for an accelerated 2027.

A Texas-born former trial attorney who built one of the country’s largest personal injury firms before fully returning to entertainment, Worley named his production company Second Chance Pictures for a reason. By the end of 2026, it may need a new one.