Every year, filmmakers and high-brow producers alike gather in Salt Lake City, Utah to host the Sundance Film Festival. This past January 2024, however, the festival’s 40th anniversary, there was an entirely new energy in the sub-zero Utah air. By the third day of the ten day long gauntlet, producers seemed weary and maybe just a little tired. It appeared that the days of massive hits with million dollar price tags coming out of Sundance were dead; by the fifth day of the festival, however, those fears had been put to rest. Streaming services bid up to 17 million dollars for hits like “It’s What’s Inside,” and the quintessential bestseller: “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeves Story.”
It seems that as long as Netflix and Amazon have money to spend they will continue to overpay for straight to streaming content. For Sundance and its backers’ perspective, that is a great thing. There will always be a monetary justification for the entertainment industry to continue this historic event, but that doesn’t mean that the festival hasn’t bent and mutated to fit the new needs of corporate Hollywood. If you take Sundance as a marker for the overall status of show business, it is clear that something has fundamentally changed.
Sundance was originally conceived as a way to finally bring artists to Utah by the young Sterling Wagenen, a student, and John Earle, the state’s film commissioner. The festival was originally meant to simply gather creative types to discuss “serious American films,” and to bring much needed tourist revenue to the state. Yet even early on, there was a hope to also premiere original indies to actors, directors, and producers alike. With the aid of an unlikely Robert Redford, Earle and Wagenen founded and held the first ever annual Sundance Film Festival on a cold September day in 1978. Thanks to Redford and a tight-knit arts community in the state, the festival proved to be a hit. Utah natives traveled across the state to see their favorite dramas and discuss them with others and stayed to watch newer and edgier movies from that same community.
While the moral victory was clear, financial backers quickly realized that they had lost massive amounts of money. With a total budget of 120,000, the event had accumulated a debt of around $40,000. Ironically though, it’s exactly that debt that forced Utah to keep going. Without any other options to make up that hole, financially-savvy filmmakers realized that they simply had to continue pressing onto into 1979 to sell more tickets. It is exactly this somewhat bizarre logic that has propelled Sundance for all these years.
The schedule too now seems shockingly emblematic of the festival’s future; films like Mean Streets, Midnight Cowboy, and A Streetcar Named Desire, were among the calling cards. But alongside those, even then, five to ten year old movies, there was space given to premiere eight screenings from local filmmakers and their creations. Those first eight original films have now grown into an over collection of Sundance originals amassing more than 1,800 films, short films, and photography. It’s tough to find a throughline in that massive group, but generally movies coming out of Sundance are low-budget and generally come from first time directors. Of that group, films like Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and Y Tu Mama Tambien seem to capture the Sundance spirit: a term difficult to really define but so powerful and distinct that you’ll know it immediately when you see it. Among those three seemingly genre-defining projects, all are from first-time directors, all are incredibly weird movies, and all are definitively “indie.”
As the film industry modernized through the new century though, so did Sundance. As Variety author Owen Glieberman puts it, “Many of the challenges the festival is now facing hinge on the technological and cultural disruptions that have upended Hollywood itself. The rise of streaming. The gut-shot wound taken by theatrical during the pandemic. Nevertheless, when you’re talking about Sundance, there’s one metric that is hard to compromise on. For the festival to maintain peak relevance…movies need to get out there, into the culture, and be successful. They need to be seen…The primal quality of danger still valued by the Sundance programmers the way it once was? I can’t know which movies they’ve decided not to program. But I do know this: The cinema that shuns danger is at risk of falling into irrelevance.”
Glieberman captures the apparently existential crisis that Sundance now faces astutely, when the business of making movies contracts indies are the first to feel the belt-tightening. As fewer families decide to step into theaters and watch long-form movies no matter where they are, studios and streaming services become more and more risk-averse. Movies like Little Miss Sunshine are still being made, albeit at much smaller rates, but there is simply a smaller cultural appetite for them. Additionally, Sundance might not be an institution built to last. After forty years of claiming to pump pure independent films into the pop-culture hit status they deserve, the festival has ingrained itself into that same pop-culture. In 2024 some of the biggest blockbuster deals coming out of Sundance were for films directed by Jesse Eisenberg and produced by Will Ferrell.
Ultimately though, not all is bleak and lost for Sundance. In fact, the event still acts as a gathering place for fans and creators alike to watch plenty of amazing films that wouldn’t have found eyes otherwise. One particularly affecting story comes from Sean Wang, a student of one of those aforementioned Sundance workshops, who just recently premiered his first full length feature Didi, a film centering around his youth skateboarding in California. The project went on to win the Audience Award and Best Ensemble. Focus Features bought up the project for a Summer release this year. Along with Wang, filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun have continued to put out new and out-there work like I Saw the TV Glow, a horror mystery surrounding a 90’s T.V. show and two Midwestern teens. Even outside the indie space, the Eisenberg and Ferrell helmed projects are supposed to be good if not great.
The Sundance Film Festival has faced numerous problems and changes across its forty six year life span, as has the film industry. Tastes and consumer spending have changed over and over again. However, the strength and vitality of the festival has never been in doubt. In a time devoid of independent art and expression, Sundance has become more valuable than ever.
The Sundance Film Festival has faced numerous problems and changes across its forty six year life span, as has the film industry. Tastes and consumer spending have changed over and over again. However, the strength and vitality of the festival has never been in doubt. In a time devoid of independent art and expression, Sundance has become more valuable than ever.