Sundance Preview: Can New Buyers and a Final Park City Hurrah Heat Up the Indie Market?

This year’s Sundance Film Festival feels like the end of something.

That’s not just because this is the final iteration of the indie film fest in Park City, Utah – its home of 43 years – before it moves to its new host city of Boulder, Colo., in 2027. Nor is it solely because it’ll be the first festival without founder Robert Redford, who died in September.

The state of independent film itself is in a period of massive upheaval, rocked by industry consolidation, struggling box office returns and, frankly, a lack of major breakout hits for going on eight years now. The festival that birthed the careers of Ryan Coogler, Damien Chazelle, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh has been relatively light on launching pad-like success stories as of late.

The highest-grossing film from last year’s Sundance was the Alison Brie/Dave Franco body horror movie “Together,” which Neon released to a box office total of $34.5 million worldwide. But after a historically slow market, only two out of 10 U.S. competition titles grossed more than $1 million: Eva Victor’s critically acclaimed “Sorry, Baby,” released by A24 to the tune of $3.3 million, and the Dylan O’Brien-fronted “Twinless,” which grossed $1.1 million worldwide after its release through Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions and Sony Pictures International.

This seems to be something of a new normal in the post-COVID festival atmosphere – one or two titles that hit at the box office, and the rest of the pickups make most of their money on PVOD and through streaming deals with box office in the sometimes-very-low seven figures. In addition to the aforementioned “Together,” 2024 saw the Oscar-winning “A Real Pain” ($24.9 million) and 2023 had the horror breakout “Talk to Me” ($92 million) and Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated “Past Lives” ($42.7 million).

TheWrap spoke to buyers, sellers and filmmakers ahead of this year’s Sundance about the prospects of the festival’s market, and while most agreed that the game has changed, they were mixed on whether there’s reason to be hopeful this year. For some, hope springs eternal. The next “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Beasts of the Southern Wild” could be just around the corner. For others, the festival’s arty programming has led to fewer commercial prospects in the changed box office landscape.

One thing’s for certain: Gone are the days when the festival had all-night bidding wars and several big pickups that turned big box office. After a number of slow Sundances in a row and even more industry consolidation, pickings are slimmer than before.

“If I’m being quite honest, I was kind of hoping there’d be more exciting titles for the last year of Sundance,” Legion M co-founder and CEO Paul Scanlan told TheWrap.

“It’s been a great festival for people who love cinema, and it’s still that, and I respect that they support small movies, there’s something there for everyone,” said JJ Caruth, president of domestic marketing and distribution for The Avenue, Highland Film Group’s domestic distribution label. “But it’s not necessarily a great marketplace for buying and selling independent film.”

Julien Levesque, an agent at Gersh, was more optimistic.

“I know just from speaking with distributors and different execs who are going, everyone is very excited to participate in this historic moment of our last Sundance in Park City,” he said. “And looking at the new distributors, we’re going in with a healthy amount of buyers who are looking to have an appetite in this market. People are going to come more armed with P&A, and they’re going to really have a focus on what film they believe will play theatrically.”

Peter Coleman, CEO of the relaunched STX Entertainment, also expressed optimism as his team prepares to descend upon Park City.

“If you don’t have a positive forward view, it makes it hard getting through the day,” he said. “But a number of players that had been sitting on the sidelines are back in, and I think there is a little bit of sort of growing pent-up demand. Everyone is very cautiously optimistic.”

There is potential for a higher quantity of sales this year as Sundance 2026 launches with four new major players in the market: Row K Entertainment launched last August and just released its first title, Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire” ($154,000 so far) with Maude Apatow’s directorial debut on the horizon. Black Bear launched a U.S. distribution division in 2025 with the Sydney Sweeney indie “Christy” ($2 million worldwide). Then there’s the new, untitled label just formed at Warner Bros. headed up by former Neon Chief Marketing Officer Christian Parks, which will be formally in the market for acquisitions at Sundance with a focus on “smartly budgeted global theatrical releases with innovative marketing campaigns”; and a fourth new player just launched this week ahead of the festival, Subtext, a distributor which will premiere “Closure” in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Response to the entry of these four players is a resounding “welcome to the party.”

“Competition is great for all of us,” Caruth said. “I think it’s exciting for exhibition to see that there’s going to be more distributors and more content. What I’d love to see is exhibition lean in a little bit more in terms of supporting independent film and helping us with the marketing support.”

The plea for support was unanimous among people TheWrap spoke to for this story, as it’s become harder than ever for indie films to break out at the box office. Genre has been selling – and working – the best, and some filmmakers argued that while the Sundance Film Festival has been programmed great for festivalgoers, it hasn’t exactly been attuned to commercial audience interest in recent years. 

“We look to the festivals and the programmers of the festivals to tell us, what are the buzziest films? And I think it’s important to make a distinction that most of the programmers at a film festival, their mandate isn’t to find the most commercially viable big projects,” Scanlan said. “They’re curating a diverse selection of art for that festival experience. So I think it can be a little bit misleading for the rest of the industry.”

Caruth, whose The Avenue specializes in action thrillers, said her company has recently found more viable pickups at SXSW.

“I just don’t think commercial viability is a priority for them, and it’s clearly a decision that they’ve made, and maybe that’ll change as they move to Colorado,” she said of Sundance. “But they’ve sort of created more of a niche for themselves, and I do think that SXSW has kind of taken advantage of that.”

That’s not to say there aren’t buzzy titles at this year’s festival that have buyers interested. Olivia Wilde stars in her third feature directorial effort, “The Invite,” alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton for a marital chamber dramedy. Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega lead Cathy Yan’s satirical dark comedy “The Gallerist.” Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in an 1800s Western called “The Weight.” And Alexander Skarsgard is a literal wicker man in “Wicker.”

And then there are the docs. Documentary film has been in a state of crisis for the last few years, with filmmakers struggling to sell or get funding for anything that isn’t true crime, celebrity or sports. Lauren Haber, head of documentary at Amplify Pictures, had success last year with “Come and See Me in the Good Light,” which won the Sundance prize for festival favorite and was picked up by Apple, and while she’s cautiously optimistic about this year’s market, she acknowledged an even more challenging landscape for docs.

“I think what we’ve been missing a lot of in recent years is that kind of middle ground,” she said. “There were years where most of the competition films landed some kind of distribution deal, and now there are fewer.”

Noting her optimism, she pointed to last year’s “The Perfect Neighbor,” a film about a white woman killing her Black neighbor in Florida that’s told entirely through bodycam footage. The movie got picked up by Netflix and was a massive success on the streamer, racking up over 40 million views in its first three weeks. Haber said the film fits into the true crime genre that’s so popular on streamers, but is “about so much more.”

Even a filmmaker of Judd Apatow’s stature has a documentary at Sundance looking for buyers, “Maria Bamford, Paralyzed by Hope,” a chronicle of how the beloved comedian channeled her mental health struggles into her comedy.

“There was a little run where all the streamers were making a lot of docs, and now it feels like they’re being more selective and have decided what kind of docs they think people watch,” Apatow told TheWrap, pointing to the popular genres of true crime, celebrity and sports. “I like seeing documentaries that break the forms, and I don’t need them to be about famous people, and they can be strange stories told in unique ways.”

He said he opted to self-finance his documentary on Bamford because he “didn’t want it to be watered down in any way,” seeking to make the film as unique as the comedian herself.

One common thread among buyers was a sense of purpose, not just in keeping independent film alive, but getting films to put in theaters – a key component of a successful PVOD release strategy, two separate buyers said.

“We want to protect and and really enrich a part of the industry that, frankly, we don’t want to go away,” Scanlan said, adding that his Legion M both acquires and distributes films but also partners with other distributors on projects. “If you look at the consolidation happening at the major studio level, it’s really pretty threatened right now. As all these studios consolidate, the number of buyers keeps decreasing, so we’re really motivated to be there.”

“I really think it’s the independent market that’s gotta lead us out of this,” STX’s Coleman said of industry consolidation. “It’s the independent filmmaker, the independent idea and ultimately growth in that space on a real volume level that’s going to improve this market.”

Come hell or high water snow banks.

The post Sundance Preview: Can New Buyers and a Final Park City Hurrah Heat Up the Indie Market? appeared first on TheWrap.