It's Boulder! Sundance Exits Utah For 2027 Move To Blue State Colorado
After over 40 years, the Sundance Film Festival is leaving Park City for a new and lucrative home in Boulder, Colorado.
As Deadline has been telling you for months, the Rocky Mountain metropolis has been in pole position over the United Utah bid and the efforts of Cincinnati, Ohio since the Robert Redford founded cinema celebration revealed the trio of finalists last September.
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Coming out of two consecutive years of Sundance being canceled for in-person screenings due to the pandemic, an overwhelmed Park City, seismic shifts in the industry, and Sundance Institute executive musical chairs, the festival was looking for dramatic reset with a new location, as Deadline exclusively reported in July 2023. To that, the official unveiling in April last year that Sundance was taking bids from contenders across the nation was an inevitability — as, in many ways, was the selection of Boulder for a 10-year long contract.
'Part of the decision-making process was around opportunity for growth,' bluntly said Acting Sundance Institute CEO Amanda Kelso to Deadline today. 'That is also an important factor for us. Knowing that we can be in a town that has 100,000 people means that it has more venues, more spaces, and more opportunities in how we can be expansive of the festival moving forward.'
Thursday's announcement is in accordance with the final decision timeline festival director Eugene Hernandez told Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. on February 22. Additionally, sealing the deal, the Sundance Institute board voted earlier this week to move the festival to Boulder, we've learned.
With a financially deep and culturally deep proposal, Boulder, which houses of the University of Colorado, put $34 million in tax incentives on the table over the decade of the new deal. Directly facing the challenges and inconvenience that have hobbled Sundance in Park City in recent years, the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau also detailed in their winning pitch a plethora of venues and lodgings that aim to make Sundance much more accessible and affordable for streamer and studio bosses as well as first time filmmakers going to Sundance on their own dime.
'Colorado is thrilled to welcome the Sundance Film Festival to its new home in Boulder starting in 2027,' Governor Jared Polis said today with news of the big move.
'Here in our state we celebrate the arts and film industry as a key economic driver, job creator, and important contributor to our thriving culture,' the two-term and openly gay Democrat added. 'Now, with the addition of the iconic Sundance Film Festival, we can expect even more jobs, a huge benefit for our small businesses including stores and restaurants. Thank you to the Sundance Institute and all of the partners like the City of Boulder, Visit Boulder, the Boulder Chamber of Commerce, and I also want to thank the bipartisan legislators and leadership who have worked tirelessly to make this possible.'
The successful presence of the Sundance Institute's hot ticket Directors Lab in Boulder in May 2024 seems to have also helped pave the road to the festival ending up in the city, we hear. At 2.5 hours from LA via plane, Boulder may prove beneficial to those who suffered from the altitude of Park City. Skiing won't be right on Main Street like in Park City, but Boulder is just 5,420 ft above sea level compared to the 7,000 to 10,000 ft above sea level of the Utah resort town.
'From a sense of space perspective, it's this really vibrant town that's surrounded by nature,' Acting Sundance CEO Kelso noted of Boulder. 'You can imagine walking from venue to venue, metabolizing the film you just watched and communing with nature which is something Robert Redford felt so strongly about. When you think about a sense of place perspective, Boulder is a cool town, it's an arts town. There are poets, musicians and filmmakers who live here. It's a tech town. It's also a college town — 38,000 students attend University of Colorado Boulder, and that creates an opportunity for us to think about audience development in a more expansive way.'
Hoping to clinch an 11th hour win, conservative Utah and its GOP Gov. Spencer Cox worked the phones and the budgets over the last week to find a way to keep Sundance, sources tell us. Sundance Institute Board Chair Ebs Burnough insisted this morning that 'politics is not the game we play,' but the fact is the winds have shifted more MAGA in the Beehive State over the past few years.
In fact, in a political measure by any other name, Sundance has listed 'ethos' and 'inclusion and accessibility' among its self-declared 'seven overreaching focus areas' that set the criteria for a new home. In that context, as Deadline reported on March 12 and again on March 25, the past month saw the passage by the Utah legislature of a bill that bans the LGTBQ+ Pride Flag from being flown on and in government buildings like schools and even the City Hall of liberal-leaning Salt Lake City.
Up against a deadline of today to sign House Bill 77, Gov. Cox hasn't said out loud yet if he will allow the clearly discriminatory act to become law.
However, HB77 sponsors Rep. Trevor Lee and Sen. Daniel McCay have made no secret of their feelings about Sundance and their legislation. On March 12, after HB77 passed, McCay sent out a tweet claiming Sundance makes 'porn' and 'does not fit in Utah anymore' while reposting a Deadline story. 'Sundance has nothing to do with the bill,' Rep Lee said to Deadline in an email late Wednesnday. 'Also the governor will sign it, he agrees with the vast majority of Utahns that taxpayer funded entities should be politically neutral.'
If Cox does sign the anti-Pride flag bill today, it will take effect in early May. Flying of the rainbow colored flag on or in a state-funded building will result in a $500 per day fine for each flag. All of which means, Sundance 2026 in Park City and SLC will likely be under the provisions of the anti-Pride flag law.
The change to Boulder is a much needed jolt to the Sundance Film Festival which has been rather sleepy in its noise post-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the festival was quite loud, from the women's marches during the early days of the first Trump administration to Taylor Swift debuting her Netflix documentary in 2020. Even the way business is conducted with film sales have changed. Gone are the days when streamers and distributors haggled all night to layout bids that were in the tens of millions of dollars. Now, given the winds of change in theatrical and streamers' needs, it just takes longer to make a sale at Sundance, read its most prolific film this past year, the Jennifer Lopez starring Kiss of the Spider Woman, just found a distributor in Roadside Attractions, Lionsgate and LD Entertainment.
Expected to be a bit of a blowout, the very last Sundance in Park City will take place from January 22 – February 1, 2026. 'We're already hard at work at the next Sundance Film Festival, festival director Hernadez admitted Thursday about Sundance's Utah finale next year. 'It will be really meaningful and special for us.'
Then, on to Boulder.
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