"But leaving to the side the days when Chloé Zhao first tromped down Main Street in a puffer jacket, Kevin Smith organized a counterprotest to Westboro Baptist Church agit-idiots picketing his Fundamentalist horror movie Red State, and 26-year-old Ryan Coogler picked up a Grand Jury Prize for Fruitvale Station, Sundance is - and remained until its last moment screening new things in Utah Sunday evening - a locus of commerce."
"While breakout titles from last year's Sundance are amply represented among this year's Academy Awards nominees - Best Picture contender Train Dreams and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (starring Rose Byrne, whose stressful, exhausting performance landed her a Best Actress berth), and all five feature documentary entries among them - the pace of sales at the 2025 festival slowed to a standstill."
The 42nd Sundance Film Festival closed its Park City run and functioned as a commercial marketplace for independent films. Roughly 90 films and episodic series premiered, but only 11 arrived with presold distribution deals, leaving most indies seeking to capitalize on the Sundance imprimatur. Breakout titles from prior Sundance editions appeared among Academy Award nominees, yet the pace of sales at the 2025 festival slowed to a standstill. Major acquisitions, including a $17 million Midnight selection sale to Neon, occurred after the festival wrapped. Since the COVID era, festival deals increasingly take place off-site, producing hybrid on-site and off-site sales.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]