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It’s hard to believe with everything else going on in the film business’ hometown right now, but this week, executives, agents, filmmakers and stars will gather for the Sundance Film Festival, an event that sets the tone for the coming year in independent cinema.
This may feel like a strange time to be retreating to the snowy climes of Park City, Utah, a resort town far from the ruins of the wildfire-afflicted Los Angeles area.
The buzz has been relatively subdued going into the festival, in large part because the Southern California fires and their devastating aftermath have captured so much of the industry’s attention. That’s to be expected. The disaster has dealt a significant blow to Hollywood and its workers, who were already struggling from the effects of the pandemic, work stoppages and cost-cutting.
But even with all the stress in L.A. due to the fires, industry stakeholders such as Deborah McIntosh, co-head of WME Independent, see plenty of reason to look forward to the festival.
“I do think that when we get to Sundance, there will be a real sense of excitement and optimism around being together among artists and watching the next crop of films and the next generation of filmmakers coming up,” McIntosh told The Times.
Will the titles themselves generate the levels of hype that audiences have come to expect from the fest? Difficult to say. It’s foolhardy to judge the health of the market before the movies even premiere. The state of the festival won’t become clear until audiences and buyers get a chance to respond to the films on offer.
“It’s very hard to ascertain which of these films could break out, because the purpose of Sundance is discovery, and to provide the biggest platform for films that you and I may normally overlook,” said CAA Media Finance agent Christine Hsu.
As the business of film has changed over the years, so has Sundance’s cultural and commercial clout. After rising to prominence in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the festival achieved a mainstream powerhouse status that arguably peaked in the mid-2000s with breakout hits such as “Little Miss Sunshine.”
It continued as a powerful launchpad for important features such as “Boyhood,” “Whiplash” and “Get Out.” Horror flicks and thrillers still tend to do well coming out of Sundance. And of course, the festival supplied a best picture Oscar winner with 2021’s “CODA,” which Apple purchased for $25 million. (Caveat: To say that was a weird year for film would be an understatement.)
During the last several years, and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, Sundance has been adjusting to new realities, including the influx of deep-pocketed streaming services and changes in audience behavior that made independent and specialty cinemas seem more niche again. In another major potential shift, Sundance is considering leaving its longtime Park City home for another locale starting in 2027.
Dealmaking for theatrical releases has been unpredictable in recent years, with streamers buying global rights to hot titles and studios often coming in more cautiously given a broader spending pullback and an uncertain outlook for smaller movies on the big screen. Box office had been on a downward trend even before the pandemic, and moviegoing has far from recovered.
Among sellers, there’s renewed hope lately that a string of independent and specialized hits will give buyers more confidence to get into bidding wars. Last year’s Sundance sales market was active, and some of the movies that got picked up, including Searchlight’s “A Real Pain,” written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, ended up resonating with moviegoers and awards voting bodies.
Focus Features’ acquisition “Conclave” (which debuted at Telluride) made money, “The Brutalist” (a Venice Film Festival pickup for A24) is finding an impassioned audience in its limited release, and Magnolia’s Sundance purchase “Thelma,” popular among older audiences, did better than anyone expected. Indie box office might not reach the heights of the past, but there is a path to success for some of these movies.
“There’s a lot of films that are giving us hope and optimism, especially for the independent space,” said CAA’s Hsu. “That’s exciting and, I hope, is an indication of what the market is going to look like going into 2025, with more distributors taking on more risk to acquire these films and give them real theatrical releases.”
After all, the overarching industry trends that analysts and pundits often obsess over don’t always dictate the market.
Going into last year’s Sundance, there was concern that belt-tightening among the studios and the aftershocks of two Hollywood strikes would dampen the appetite for indie film purchases. But companies shelled out anyway, with Netflix plunking down a reported $17 million for Greg Jardin’s body-swap feature “It’s What’s Inside,” while Amazon MGM Studios paid $15 million for Megan Park’s poignant dramedy “My Old Ass.”
Sometimes it’s just about the movies themselves, and there are certain titles that — speaking about them sight unseen — have the potential to attract attention.
Among them is “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Bill Condon’s adaptation of the 1990s stage play of the same name (a film version of the Manuel Puig novel came out in 1985), starring Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna. It’s a somewhat unusual example of established intellectual property hitting Sundance.
Also on offer is Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams,” about a day laborer building railroads in early 20th century America; Evan Twohy’s feature debut, “Bubble & Squeak,” about a couple of cabbage smugglers (yes, you read that right); Hailey Gates’ satirical “Atropia,” with Alia Shawkat; and horror film “Together,” starring real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco.
“There’s going to be an abundance of creative discovery that tests people’s assumptions of what Sundance is, which is a good thing, because Sundance is in a place where it’s constantly needing to reinvent itself,” said Ross Fremer, an executive at entertainment management, sales and advisory firm Cinetic Media.
Fremer is banking on a couple of biographical documentaries to break through at a time when the doc business has been challenging. Among those for sale are “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” about the first Deaf actor to win an Oscar; and “Selena y Los Dinos,” which follows the rise of the famed Tejano singer Selena and her family band.
“It’s going to be an extremely well curated group of biodocs this year,” Fremer said. “That’s going to be hopefully the tip of the spear for documentaries.”
There’s another title with a now strangely relevant logline: director Max Walker-Silverman’s drama starring Josh O’Connor as a rancher looking for “a way forward” after a wildfire destroys the family farm. The movie is called “Rebuilding.”
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Here are the famed movie and TV locations destroyed in the Southern California fires. The Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed or damaged several locations, including Will Rogers State Historic Park.
Even before the L.A. fires, Hollywood jobs were hard to find. Will the work ever come back? As Hollywood goes through vast technological, financial and global change, the state’s cornerstone entertainment industry and its workers face a hard reality.
Jury finds CNN defamed security consultant in Afghanistan evacuation report. Zachary Young, a security consultant who charged $14,000 or more to evacuate people from Afghanistan, said the network defamed him in its 2021 report on war profiteers.
TikTok’s future
Social video app TikTok came back to life Sunday in the U.S., after a brief outage brought on by a law signed by President Biden to ban the service unless its Chinese parent company found a buyer for it.
The legislation, meant to address national security concerns having to do with a foreign adversary having access to millions of people’s data, went into effect on Jan. 19, leaving the popular app in limbo. But TikTok restored its service after President-elect Trump said he would issue an executive order granting ByteDance a 90-day extension to locate an approved buyer.
Trump, who took office Monday, has ironically become TikTok’s potential savior after his first administration pushed to have it banned. But the company’s future is still uncertain. There’s no guarantee that a deal will happen (for more details on what might happen next, check out this piece by my colleague Andrea Chang).
But at this point, I would put the odds of TikTok going dark permanently in the coming months quite low. Too many powerful people appear highly motivated to preserve it.
Who could buy it? Former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has been assembling a bid that includes “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary. Analysts have of course floated X owner and Trump ally Elon Musk as a potential purchaser. Former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin last year said he was assembling an investor group to take over TikTok.
It’s remarkable to see all this high-stakes political drama play out over an app best known for goofy dance videos, lip-syncs and short-form comedy sketches.
There’s no doubt that TikTok has influenced American culture. Certain memes, like that damn “Oh No” song, just wouldn’t be as big without it, and many influencers came to prominence there. But writing in the Atlantic, writer Kate Lindsay made the case that TikTok “just isn’t all that important.” Content creators were already starting to migrate elsewhere. Remember, Vine died. America survived.