Sundance Is Over. Long Live Sundance.
PARK CITY, UTAH – The Sundance Film Festival is over before it even begins at the oldest movie house in Park City, Utah. Built in 1926, the Egyptian—which took lavish design inspiration from King Tut’s tomb, then recently discovered—was the first theater in town to play talkies. Decades later, it would become synonymous with Sundance, the annual movie lovers’ summit that draws thousands of tourists, journalists, and industry insiders to the city every January. But there is no Sundance at the Egyptian in 2026, because the Egyptian doesn’t show movies anymore. After 100 years, it’s now strictly a live event space. If you didn’t know better, you might swear the city was already moving on from its flagship cultural event, closing the curtain on this yearly celebration one year ahead of schedule.
Of course, it’s Sundance that’s leaving Park City, not the other way around. As the media world and the movie industry in particular continue to hurtle toward an uncertain future—fewer projects, fewer studios, shorter theatrical windows—America’s biggest film festival sets course for new ground. Pulling up stakes after more than four decades of calling Utah home, the whole shebang moves to Boulder, Colorado, next winter. Tax breaks are said to be one reason. A desire for a more spacious campus is another. And then there’s the ever-widening chasm that’s opened between the values of Sundance’s yearly programming and the incompatible “trigger law” politics of Utah itself. One wonders if it was simply Robert Redford, the festival’s legendary founder, holding its what and where together for so long.
Yes, this is the final Sundance in Park City. It feels an awful lot like the final Sundance, period. In 2026, a thin layer of melancholy has settled over the event, like snow accumulating on the mountains in the distance. For a lowly film critic back in Utah, hoping to experience the festival as he remembers it before everything changes, the most banal traditions take on a suddenly sentimental glow. “Here is the last Burger King value meal I’ll inhale between back-to-back screenings at the Holiday Village,” he soberly thinks, chewing.
The Sundance team is nostalgic, too. Kim Yutani, the festival’s director of programming, calls for a moment of gratitude to Park City every time she’s on stage. She’s first there to introduce the opening screening of the fest, a showing of Amir Bar-Lev’s new documentary, The Last First: Winter K2, about a bunch of foolhardy thrill-seekers who endeavor to reach one of the world’s highest, most dangerous summits at the most treacherous time of year. That’s right, the first movie of the last Sundance in Park City is called The Last First. Bar-Lev insists it’s purely a coincidence, but I’m not so sure. Like the film’s subjects, many of us are winded high in the mountains, pining for excitement or transcendence.
As the media world and the movie industry in particular hurtle toward an uncertain future, America’s biggest film festival sets course for new ground.
Charli XCX, the hyperpop It Girl who appears in three films at the festival (including The Moment, a mockumentary that casts her as a particularly, well, bratty version of herself), indirectly acknowledges the elephant in the room, too. “This movie is about the end of an era,” she says, talking about that indefinite summer she got everyone wearing green and partying like a messy millennial. But her words naturally take on double meaning in the Eccles Theater, the second-most iconic of Sundance’s regular venues, mostly by virtue of its sheer size and the glamour of the celebrities that so often grace its stage. (Charli also shows up in The Gallerist, starring an archly overacting Natalie Portman, who blithely ignores a fan trying to bum-rush her for an autograph outside the Eccles. The volunteers, so often unfailingly chipper, snarl and shoo him off.)
The true guest of honor in Park City is only here in spirit. Over six days, no one ever stops clapping for Robert Redford, voice and face of the festival even in death. It’s both that greet us before every movie, via a pair of almost religiously reverent memorial reels. If people ever tire of them, it doesn’t show. The ovations continue all week, unabated and enthusiastic. At some point, wistful feelings blur together: When we applaud Redford, are we mourning both the mythic Hollywood leading man and the event eulogizing him ad nauseam?
MAYBE IT’S SILLY TO LAMENT Sundance changing. After all, the festival has been in a state of constant (if gradual) change for just about its entire history. Granted, Park City has been the constant—at least since 1981, when Redford shifted things from Salt Lake City to his favorite ski-slope destination about 40 miles away. Back then, it was called the US Film and Video Festival—less awkward but no less generic than the fest’s original name, the Utah/US Film Festival. By the time Redford rechristened it after his most iconic character in 1991, Sundance was no longer strictly a haven for microbudget movies. It was evolving with the definition of “independent cinema.”
Sundance has nearly as many eras as Taylor Swift (an esteemed former guest of the festival, like just about any celebrity of the last 40-plus years). There was that early stretch, when both the fest and the films were small, and nothing in the program looked remotely Hollywood. The Weinsteins changed all that when they turned sex, lies, and videotape into an unlikely blockbuster, making Miramax a major player overnight and proving that a movie didn’t have to cost a lot to make a lot. Next came the bidding wars of the ’90s, the rise of Sundance alumni like Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, and the years when Harvey lorded over his Park City fiefdom, feeding his wallet, ego, and abusive appetites all at once.
Yours truly came to Sundance too late to witness any of that, or any of the true spending sprees—those years when every studio was chasing the next Little Miss Sunshine. But even my own decade on the ground was eventful and transitional. I was there for Fruitvale Station and Whiplash and The Birth of a Nation and the gauntlet of terror that was Hereditary. I saw Sundance grapple uncomfortably with the downfall of Weinstein, the mogul and monster with whom it developed a symbiotic relationship. I saw Redford finally step away from his role as ambassador of the fest, concluding that it had grown beyond the need for his annual introductions. He was right: Sundance survived his exit and it survived the pandemic, too, becoming an online-only event for a couple of years—a transition so smooth and successful that the remote option is now a permanent arrangement.
Sundance is a little smaller these days. The lineups have shrunk. The budgets, too. As the indie film world continues to contract, so has the festival that was founded to support it. Maybe it’s not just the politics of Utah but also the entire guiding philosophy of Hollywood that’s no longer compatible with the ethos of Sundance. Is the fest destined to be squashed under the boot of David Zaslav and his ilk? Or is it simply returning to its original state as a truly independent enterprise, a beacon of creativity on the outskirts of the business?
Either way, massive sales out of Park City are increasingly a thing of the Miramaxian past, though there is one classic all-night bidding war this year: After 72 hours of competing offers, A24 walks away with The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s broad, bantering comedy of marital duress, which draws bigger lines than anything else in the lineup. Ten-plus million honestly seems too hefty a price tag for the film (it’s like a sitcom Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, loud enough for prime time), but maybe A24 is feeling nostalgic, too. Like Charli, everyone here wants to party like it’s 2006.
EVEN WHEN THE MOVIES WERE BIG, Park City was small. That’s always been crucial to the identity of Sundance. Everyone eats at the same restaurants. Everyone packs into the same theaters to watch the same movies. Everyone bundles up to climb Main Street, the city’s long upward stretch of bars, galleries, and overpriced pizzerias. It’s like Bourbon Street but cold and with worse music. Near the top sits the Egyptian, now looking like a premature sarcophagus for the festival itself. Its marquee reads “Sundance,” but there’s no projector flickering inside and no lines stretching into the alley next door.
Word travels fast and buzz spreads like a bug in Park City. The insularity of the town is critical to its success as an incubator of hype. Only in such a closed ecosystem could Happy, Texas or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl seem like a bargain buy at eight figures. It’s a common joke that people are too lightheaded from the altitude to think clearly during a movie at Sundance. But the real culprit might be the bubble the festival throws over everything.
Sundance creates its own reality. That’s an uncomfortable feeling in 2026, like partying in a snow globe as the world burns. Here and there, cracks form across the glass. On Monday, a big crowd marches down Main Street to protest ICE, chanting a slogan that’s maybe a hair too cute: “Shoot movies, not people.” It’s in response to the killing of Alex Pretti, which happens three days into the fest. It also feels like a callback to the women’s marches that happened in Park City during #MeToo—another way that Sundance seemed to be atoning for its mutually beneficial connection to Weinstein.
Sometimes the movies also break through to breaking news. This year, we get Everybody to Kenmure Street, a crowd-pleasing documentary about a Glasgow neighborhood that came together to stop a deportation. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to think of the inspiring people of Minneapolis. Nuisance Bear, which ends up winning the grand jury prize for U.S. Documentary, provokes a more meta line of thinking: Like the film’s ursine subject, Sundance will soon lumber out of its snowy natural habitat.
Losing the festival is a hit to the economy of Utah. All the same, you sometimes get a sense of relief among the locals that their backyard won’t be invaded by thousands of starfuckers and executives anymore. One of my roommates at the festival, film critic Zachary Lee, catches an Uber back to the condo we’re sharing. His driver is ambivalent about Sundance’s imminent departure: “The festival expected us to buy into their culture without trying to adapt to ours.”
For out-of-towners not putting their expenses on Neon’s tab, Sundance can be prohibitively costly. One bitter irony is that an event supposedly all about creating community and celebrating DIY artists unfolds every year in a winter playground for the wealthy—a place where you’re lucky to snag an Airbnb for less than $300 a night. I think about my first year at Sundance, when I crashed on the couch of a friend of a friend of a friend who was selling drugs out of his apartment at all hours of the day and night. Anything for cinema, I rationalized. My accommodations are nicer these days, but there’s no denying that Park City can feel exclusive, like a giant ski resort that happens to spool up films about dysfunctional families.
Is it the town we’ll miss or just the idea of Sundance as a familiar place, a haven we all return to year after year? There’s something rather symbolically ominous about the festival ditching its half-century base of operations right now. It seems in keeping with the ways that moviegoing itself is migrating—how it’s leaving physical venues like the Egyptian for the streaming void. The future of movie theaters themselves is yet another uncertainty looming, K2-like, over this waning week in Utah. Maybe it’s just the presence of Netflix, which announced its intentions to acquire Warner Bros. five days before the Sundance lineup dropped. The streaming giant is here in Park City with a documentary about chess that probably won’t play on the big screen ever again.
Somehow, there are reasons to be hopeful. Best-case scenario, this move opens Sundance up to a wider community, in the same way that taking the program online has. After all, Boulder is a much bigger place, with more lodging, more food, easier arrivals. There’s no reason that the festival has to be defined forever by Park City or by any city. Anyway, Sundance may be literally uprooting itself, but it’s been figuratively doing so since almost the very beginning. Optimistically, the end of one era is just the beginning of another for an institution that will probably go on post-Utah, just as it’s continued post-Weinstein, post-Redford, even post-IRL.
ALL THE SAME, A SENSE OF FINALITY swallows Sundance in its backstretch. Things always get a little quiet by Tuesday, crowds thinning, lines shortening. To paraphrase the immortal words of John Denver—warbled by a character in zi, the rather tossed-off new movie by Sundance alum Kogonada—everyone is leaving on a jet plane. But this year, many of us know we won’t be back again.
As far as the actual movies go, it’s an uneven Sundance. These bleary eyes see only one truly major work, and that’s Josephine, a shattering drama starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents trying and spectacularly failing to help their young daughter move past something horrible she witnesses. The film flattens me emotionally—there’s Josephine, and then there’s everything else I catch at the festival this year. The jury for the U.S. Dramatic program, which highlights early features by new American filmmakers, seems to concur: They hand writer-director Beth de Araújo the grand prize on Friday. Not since Whiplash took the festival by storm a dozen years ago has its signature award gone to a worthier recipient.
But then, this final trip to Park City is about more than the movies. It’s also about the rituals: seeing old friends and colleagues in line outside a theater; scarfing down a quick bagel at Wasatch before the next premiere or downing a beer at the Yarrow hotel bar after your last screening of the day; taking a scenic shuttle ride to the Park City Library, whose punishing legroom and worse sight lines no sane person will miss. Maybe what we’re really chasing is a time, a mere few years back, when criticism felt like a more viable vocation. As the market for indie movies narrows tighter than any rush ticket line, so does the parasitic industry of writing about them. At the last Sundance in Park City, the critics are really partying like it’s 2016.
My final movie of the festival is aptly valedictory, in name and nature. There can be no doubt that this is intentional scheduling: The programmer on stage is quick to point out that we’re about to see the last narrative Sundance movie that will ever premiere at the Eccles. Such bittersweet framing certainly benefits the film, a very modest character study called The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, with John Turturro as an aging small-time thief taking stock of the richer life he may have stolen from himself.
After the movie, I catch a shuttle to Main Street. At night, it looks like a Coca-Cola commercial, wintry and twinkling. Lungs be damned, I want one last glimpse of the Egyptian, so I begin the climb up Park City’s most famous stretch, which I remember once sprinting up with a friend and fellow critic, Nick Allen, to squeeze last-minute into a morning screening of Bo Burnham’s humane coming-of-age comedy Eighth Grade. Everything is a little hushed now. The festival is winding down as surely as Main Street winds up.
The Egyptian is closed. The words “Sundance Film Festival” have been removed from its marquee. Bill Engvall, whom a poster advertises as the “legendary blue collar comic,” is in town for four days of stand-up—a residency that will occupy the historic theater through the end of the festival. How can you tell that Sundance as you’ve known it is truly over? To quote the man on the poster, here’s your sign.
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