Intro for March 28, 2025

Dear Gossips,  

Big news in independent film, as of 2027 the Sundance Film Festival will call Boulder, Colorado home. 2026 will be the fest’s last year in Park City, Utah, which has been home to the festival since 1981. 

There have been grumblings for years that Sundance outgrew the facilities in Park City, both to host film screenings and festival guests, with limited and exorbitantly priced hotel rooms, and long commutes, often through inclement weather, for those punted to distant hotels and condos because of the shortage of rooms available in town. Boulder is a much larger city, with a population of over 100,000, and is expected to more comfortably—and affordably—accommodate festival guests, from talent to filmmakers to buyers to press and critics to cinephiles traveling to watch some movies.

I just looked up hotel room costs in Boulder for next January...even if they DOUBLE in 2027...still massively cheaper than Park City they made the right move

— Gregory Ellwood (@gregoryellwood.bsky.social) 2025-03-28T02:18:15.802Z

A year ago, the Sundance Institute began entertaining bids for a new home for the festival, with three front runners emerging by the end of the year: Boulder, Salt Lake City, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Ultimately, Boulder won, and I wonder how much of that is down to keeping Sundance’s “mountain view”. Boulder is in the Rockies, it’s gorgeous, there is great skiing nearby—a lot of the perks of Sundance are maintained in Boulder, but it’s much larger, with more venues for screenings, more hotel rooms, with a more developed downtown core and public transportation, plus excellent microbreweries and dispensaries for extracurricular fun. 

It’s not that Park City isn’t cool, but between the very real cost crunch of outrageously jacked prices for accommodations and increasingly hostile conservative leadership in the Utah state house—which passed an anti-2SLGBTQIA+ bill this year banning Pride flags from schools and government buildings—the more liberal Colorado has a clear edge for a public arts festival that celebrates expression and inclusion. The trustees of the Sundance Institute were already entertaining bids to move before the 2024 election, but despite some reported 11th hour hustling from the Utah governor, who is Republican, to keep Sundance in the state, ultimately, they elected to leave. Salt Lake City is almost twice the size of Boulder, so even though Sundance Institute chair Ed Burnough said, “politics is not the game we play” I can’t help but think it had some role in their final decision. 

The move doesn’t take effect until 2027, so Park City has one last hurrah before Sundance pulls up stakes. Beginning in 2027, though, two of North America’s premiere film fests will be hosted in Colorado, as they already have their own homegrown fest in Telluride. Is Colorado the hot new Hollywood destination? 

Live long and gossip,

Sarah