Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award
The Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to the movie rated as the year's best film according to TIFF audience. Past sponsors of the award have included Cadillac and Grolsch.
The winners of this award have often later earned Academy Award nominations, to the point that the award is now considered to be effectively the "starting gun" of the Academy Award nominations race.
In 2009, the festival introduced separate People's Choice Awards for Documentaries and Midnight Madness. In 2015, it also introduced a People's Choice Award for its satellite Canada's Top Ten festival, which was discontinued after 2018 due to TIFF's decision to switch the Canada's Top Ten program from a dedicated festival to a series of week-long theatrical screenings.
For the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF announced plans to introduce a new International People's Choice Award for films from outside North America, while reserving the original People's Choice Award for films from Canada and the United States.
Process
At each film screening, attendees are invited to vote for the film as People's Choice after the show. Formerly conducted in the lobby of the theatre after the show, People's Choice voting is now conducted principally online, with voters' e-mail addresses cross-referenced against ticket registrations to ensure that the vote cannot be manipulated by people who have not actually seen the film at TIFF.However, to ensure that the voting process does not bias the award toward films that screened in larger theatres and that a film's own cast and crew cannot stuff the ballot box, the overall number of votes received is also weighted against the size of the screening audience. For example, a film which screened in a smaller theatre, but had a highly passionate fan base, can have an advantage over a film that had a larger number of raw votes but a more mixed or uneven reception. Because each film is screened multiple times over the course of the entire festival, the process also enables the organizers to evaluate which films are generating more audience buzz, by virtue of a significant increase in attendance and/or People's Choice votes at the follow-up screenings.
Films that are in strong contention for the People's Choice Award will often, although not always, have extra screenings added to the program toward the end of the festival, although this does not necessarily guarantee that a film with added screenings will always make the top three.
After the award is announced, the festival offers several repeat screenings of the winner at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on the final day of the festival.
Winners
The table below shows the People's Choice winners of past years. Prior to 2000, only the overall winner was named each year; in that year, the festival began announcing the first and second runners-up for the award as well. At the 2004 festival, no first or second runners-up were officially named for the People's Choice Award; however, festival director Piers Handling did provide the media with a list of numerous other films that had been in the running, including Crash, Gunner Palace, I, Claudia, Up and Down, 3-Iron, Ma Mère, The Holy Girl, Red Dust, Brides, Saving Face and Sideways. The festival named four runners-up rather than two in 2005, and only one runner-up in 2010, but has otherwise always named two runners-up for the award.The table notes whether films have been winners or nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film or Best Documentary Feature.
Prior to the creation of the separate People's Choice Award for Documentaries, the main award was won by two documentary films, Best Boy in 1979 and Roger & Me in 1989.
On four occasions to date, the award has been won by a Canadian film. Two of those films, The Decline of the American Empire in 1986 and The Hanging Garden in 1997, were also named as the winners of the juried award for Best Canadian Film, although the 2007 winner Eastern Promises and the 2015 winner Room were not. All four films were also Best Picture nominees at the Genie Awards or the Canadian Screen Awards, which The Decline of the American Empire and Room won.
To date, Chloé Zhao is the only director ever to have won the top award twice, winning in 2020 for Nomadland and in 2025 for Hamnet.