The Cannes film festival boasts some of the noisiest audiences in the world – and if they don’t like your movie, you’ll soon know about it. A few years ago, before they were reupholstered, the seats in the 2,300-capacity Grand Theatre Lumière would automatically flip up, making a booming sound to mark the early exit of disgruntled critics. Booing and jeering are common when the end credits roll. But last year’s festival marked a first: at several screenings, audiences took to hissing and whistling before the movie had even started.

The focus of their wrath was the Netflix logo that preceded Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories. It was the first time the streaming platform had been accepted into the main competition and the pushback was immediate. Film purists were already upset by the festival’s embrace of TV series, with Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and David Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks both given special screenings. But Netflix proved a bridge too far. In France, a film can’t appear on streaming platforms until 36 months after its release in cinemas, but Netflix’s films didn’t get even a token cinema release. There is a rumour that the Cannes protests were orchestrated via a text message sent by French exhibitors.

Festival director Thierry Frémaux responded quickly to the fuss, imposing a ban on streaming films in competition from 2018 – a move that prompted Netflix boss Ted Sarandos to comment simply, and darkly, that the company, which is set to invest $8bn in content this year, now found Cannes a “less attractive” prospect. Nearly a year on, Sarandos and the festival seemed to have buried the hatchet, and the reports in the trades are that five Netflix films had actually been accepted by the festival. But Frémaux reopened the wound in March, in a controversial interview with Le Film Francais. As well as revealing his plans to dispense with early morning press screenings and ban selfies on the red carpet, Frémaux slightly rephrased the previous year’s embargo: streaming films, he said, would be welcome in Out of Competition slots.

Now it seems likely that Netflix was playing a longer game. This week, in the run-up to the announcement of the festival’s official selection, came news that Netflix was about to withdraw its five titles – a piece of brinksmanship designed to ruffle festival programmers, who famously go to the wire, with Frémaux sometimes making vital decisions in the early hours of the night before the press conference.

Netflix has so far not commented on the impasse, or even acknowledged it, but, if true, the withdrawals could blast a big hole in the Cannes lineup. It would mean that Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón will miss out on his Cannes feature debut, for his Mexico-set drama Roma; Paul Greengrass, who has been only once, with his 9/11 film United 93, will not be bringing his new project Norway, the story of white-supremacist killer Anders Breivik; and Cannes regular Jeremy Saulnier will be denied a step up from Directors Fortnight with his new film Hold the Dark, a dark, Alaskan-set thriller starring Alexander Skarsgård.

But likely to strike even closer to Frémaux’s heart would be the retraction of Morgan Neville’s Orson Welles documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, and a restored version of Welles’s unfinished final film The Other Side of the Wind, a once mythical work that Frémaux surely eyed as a highlight of his always impressive Cannes Classics sidebar.

With three days to go, anything is still possible, but the tensions between the festival and streaming services will probably not be going away any time soon, especially if Apple moves on its promise to commit $1bn to TV and film production this year. Traditionally, any high-profile film denied a place at Cannes will find a warm welcome at Venice or Toronto. But the suspicion remains that films financed by streaming services are, to use Frémaux’s term, “hybrids”. It’s not unthinkable to suggest that, in time, these digital platforms might yet team up to found their own festival (indeed, France currently has five TV events, from the long-running Monte Carlo television festival to this year’s inaugural Canneseries) and establish the streaming movie as a genre of its own. While Netflix and Cannes are engaged in a cold war, the fight for the future of cinema is warming up.