The credits are rolling on Sundance Film Festival in Park City

IN THE DAYS leading up to the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, is quiet with anticipation. Festival banners adorn lamp-posts and lights zigzag across Main Street. In the 41 years since it began, the festival has transformed Park City and offered a vital showcase to independent film-makers. However, in typical Hollywood fashion, everyone is already awaiting the sequel. On January 22nd Sundance kicked off its final festival in Utah before moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027.

No one is sure how the next era for Sundance will play out, but the festival is needed more than ever. Years of upheaval in Hollywood—the rise of streaming, the pandemic, labour strikes and corporate consolidation—mean there are fewer buyers for indie movies than there were at the advent of streaming. Distributors of feature films and documentaries are more risk-averse. “We’re coming out of the so-called ‘golden age’ when the streamers started to pay a gazillion dollars to buy content from Sundance,” says Violet Du Feng, a documentary-maker with close ties to the festival. “Those times are gone.”

This year also marks the first festival without Robert Redford, who died aged 89 in September. Redford founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 to help incubate independent film-makers and serve as an antidote to Hollywood’s frippery. (He named the non-profit after the mustachioed outlaw he played in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, a Western.)

The plan worked. For decades the festival has provided a launching pad for newbie screenwriters and directors, some of whom became the industry’s leading auteurs, from Richard Linklater to Wes Anderson. This awards season offers further evidence. Three directors vying for trophies—Chloé Zhao (“Hamnet”), Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (“One Battle After Another”)—got their start with Sundance. The festival has also helped enliven whole genres. “The Blair Witch Project” was made for less than $1m, opened at Sundance in 1999 and sold for $1.1m. Then it revolutionised horror, grossing $486m in today’s money, nearly as much as the “Wicked” sequel.

Sundance’s move to Boulder illustrates two things about the film industry. One is how the geography of Hollywood’s film business is shifting. Tax incentives are king. Film production began to flee California for Europe and Canada in the late 1990s, when the dollar was strong, and continued to shift away in the aughts once more states and countries offered incentives. According to FilmLA, which tracks filming in Los Angeles, the region saw fewer shoot days in 2025 than in any year except 2020, when the pandemic halted filming. Sundance’s move is also partly dictated by dollars. Colorado offered the festival nearly $70m in tax incentives to go there.

The festival’s move is a savvy one. Boulder is still a mountain town, an indelible part of Sundance’s character, but it is bigger and easier to travel to. Park City is basically a collection of resorts. A hotel stay during the festival can cost a small fortune; film-makers complain that they cannot afford to attend. The top of Main Street offers a panoramic view of ski chalets, and Sotheby’s advertises townhouses starting at $9m. “There’s no question that they have outgrown Park City,” says Steve Fenberg, a former president of Colorado’s state Senate, who helped woo Sundance to Boulder.

Second, film-makers frame the move as an opportunity to double down on the importance of indie film when studios are offering audiences mainly sequels and remakes. But success will require new financing models. Brands may begin to play a bigger role. Last year Sundance partnered with Rolex, a watch firm, to help fund its screenwriters’ “lab”. Michelle Satter, who helped found and run Sundance’s artists’ programmes, says they are open to “corporate support, individual support, foundational support”, even “selling sweatshirts” to fund film-makers.

Amid all this change, the next crop of promising screenwriters may be wondering where to start. Redford had some advice for that, too: “Humour. Skill. Wit. Sex appeal. That order.”■