After practically 40 years in Park Metropolis, the Sundance Movie Competition could also be pulling up stakes.
With its present contract expiring after the 2026 competition, organizers of the enduring Robert Redford-founded indie movie shindig within the Utah mountain city mentioned Wednesday that they’ve opened a bid course of for a doable transfer to a brand new metropolis. As Deadline completely reported final summer season, Sundance has quietly been contemplating a change for some time.
On the similar time, with the 2025 and 2026 festivals nonetheless set for Park Metropolis, we hear the incumbent location stays within the combine. To that finish, Sundance can be exploring a renewal of its newest 13-year-old cope with the expensive resort city if a robust sufficient native provide is positioned on the desk.
The decision to open the method now, with greater than six months to go earlier than any renewal with Park Metropolis needed to be determined upon, was signed off on by founder and board president Redford himself, we hear.
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Beginning immediately and operating till Might 1, Sundance is placing out a Request for Info for U.S. hamlets and venues to place their toe(s) within the snow, so to talk. As soon as the candidates are whittled right down to probably the most viable, that RFI can be adopted by a Request for Proposal course of from Might 7-June 21 to evaluate different host areas, with an emphasis on inclusivity and sustainability.
After that, a SFF RFI/RFP process pressure will provide its suggestions to the Ebs Burnough-led Sundance Institute board for a closing choice.
“We sit up for reviewing every proposal and dealing along with all of our potential collaborators to find out how we are able to collectively meet the wants of the impartial movie ecosystem and broader inventive neighborhood,” Burnough mentioned immediately. “We’re in a novel second for our Competition and our international movie neighborhood, and with the contract up for renewal, this exploration permits us to responsibly contemplate how we finest proceed sustainably serving our neighborhood whereas sustaining the essence of the Competition expertise,” added Eugene Hernandez, Sundance programming director.
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Going deep into the latter a part of the 12 months, it’s doubtless the brand new location or the renewal of the Park Metropolis deal could be unveiled on the finish of the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition, we’re informed — if they’ll maintain it underneath wraps that lengthy.
Whereas most film followers solely know Park Metropolis as the house of Sundance, the competition had a wide range of locales together with the Sundance Resort and Salt Lake Metropolis in its early incarnations. Nonetheless, amidst a slew of Sundance management exits and additions over the previous 5 years, the crippling results of the pandemic on in-person attendance and a quickly altering media trade, the notion of a brand new location for the competition outdoors of Park Metropolis has been in works for months.
At one level earlier this 12 months, as Sundance opened extra labs in additional cities, it regarded as if the consensus was for the strained competition to flip the script and make Salt Lake Metropolis its major location, with Park Metropolis as a satellite tv for pc.
Nevertheless, with monetary considerations, as properly contractions amongst consumers and filmmakers an ever-increasing actuality for the high-altitude fest, board members and different stakeholders noticed the expiration of the present Park Metropolis contract as a “uncommon alternative” to “redefine what Sundance is within the digital age,” as one well-placed supply put it.
“One thing needed to change, the competition is outgrowing Park Metropolis, the stretch marks are displaying,” a Sundance insider tells us. “The established order wanted a kick and a restart, and that is one of the simplest ways to do it, even when it places a couple of folks’s noses out of joint.”
Amy Redford, who has taken on a higher position at Sundance over the previous decade as her 87-year-old father has progressively stepped again, can be on the duty pressure that takes in bids and functions. She additionally serves on the Sundance Institute board along with her father, together with the likes of Jason Blum, Tessa Thompson, Lulu Wang and former Disney exec Sean Bailey.
But, for all of the grumbling from the locals through the years about congestion and out-of-towners, Park Metropolis isn’t about to let the competition go and not using a battle, it appears.
“We respect our partnership with Sundance, and we would like the Competition to stay right here for an additional 40 years,” Park Metropolis Mayor Nann Worel on Wednesday. “We is not going to be alone within the effort to make sure that Utah stays host to various new voices from across the globe. With gratitude to the 1000’s of volunteers, our devoted workforce, our residents, and the fervour of our customer and resident movie lovers — we’ll work collaboratively with all our state and native companions on subsequent steps.”
These subsequent steps contain a complete bundle of incentives, infrastructure builds and extra, sources say.
The very fact is the need to maintain Sundance on the snowy slopes of Park Metropolis and Salt Lake Metropolis, the place the competition has had a rising presence lately, is predicated lots on chilly exhausting money.
Though the 2023 SFF noticed a little bit of a dip from pre-pandemic years, the competition introduced in simply greater than $118 million to Utah’s GNP, based on the newest knowledge. Digging down into the numbers, Sundance delivered $12.3 million in tax income to the state coffers, $96 million in spending by out-of-state guests, and $63 million in wages.
These are fairly robust the reason why the state intends to bid exhausting to maintain the competition, be it in Park Metropolis or Salt Lake Metropolis.
“We see this as a possibility to reimagine what the way forward for the competition seems to be like in Utah,” Utah Movie Fee director Virginia Pearce informed Deadline immediately. “With over 40 years of demonstrated success as the house of the Sundance Movie Competition, we’re well-positioned to proceed this partnership.”
In its heyday, Sundance was finest referred to as the launch pad for auteurs comparable to Quentin Tarantino, Ava DuVernay, David O. Russell, Nicole Holofcener, Kevin Smith, Ryan Coogler, Steven Soderbergh and Darren Aronofsky amongst many others. The slopeside gathering additionally had huge expensive acquisitions by main theatrical studios (learn $10 million for 1996’s Spitfire Grill by Citadel Rock and Searchlight’s pickup of 2016’s Beginning of a Nation for $17.5 million).
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Nevertheless, over the previous decade, streamers comparable to Netflix have moved in with heavy muscle. The tech-based corporations have purchased up the slots for star-studded mainstream opening-night movies (like 2020’s Taylor Swift‘s Netflix documentary Miss Americana). They’ve additionally taken lots of the competition’s films off the desk and out of big-screen distributors’ palms for awards-season runs, with current examples together with Apple snapping up final Oscar Finest Image winner CODA for $25 million, and Netflix shopping for Carey Mulligan’s Southern interval drama Mudbound for $12.5 million in 2017.
Dominic Patten/Deadline
Sundance’s magnificence contest for a brand new location comes at a time when swaths of Park Metropolis itself are fairly cynical concerning the movie competition, with a lot of that unhealthy blood fashioned popping out of the pandemic.
A number of native companies Deadline spoke with expressed their ongoing frustration and anger about Sundance’s eleventh-hour cancellation of the 2022 competition in December 2021 as a consequence of fears of the Omicron strand. For the likes of eating places that depend on the tens of 1000’s of holiday makers who hit the competition annually for a 3rd or extra of their yearly income, it was cash misplaced that they’d by no means get again. As well as, Park Metropolis denizens produce other gripes concerning the competition together with terrible visitors circumstances, and the arrival of cocky trade folks from New York Metropolis and Los Angeles who they mock as the “PIBs” (“Folks in Black”).
Institutionally, some say the writing has been within the snow since June 2022, when programming director Tabitha Jackson left. Changing John Cooper in 2020, Jackson vied to maintain the competition afloat with a largely digital version in 2021 and 2022. The previous head of SFF’s documentary division, she additionally programmed fest movies at indie theaters and drive-ins in Covid-safe areas of the U.S.
Caught in the course of each the struggling Toronto Movie Competition and Sundance was competition boss and former indie movie producer Joana Vicente, who wrangled each fests throughout the pandemic period. Vicente’s time at TIFF was short-lived, from 2019- 2021, earlier than she grew to become CEO of Sundance Institute. She arrived to a Sundance per experiences that noticed revenues for the competition drop from $56 million in 2020 pre-Covid to $34 million for the digital 2021 session. Regardless of shaving $2 million in liabilities throughout her transient run, Vicente’s fundraising expertise have been reportedly questioned by the Sundance Institute’s board of trustees, which led to her exit late final month.
Board member Amanda Kelso was named performing CEO within the wake of Vicente’s sudden exit, and a search is underway for a brand new chief.
Now the competition finds itself on the search for each a brand new boss, and presumably a brand new residence.