One celebrity visiting the 2025 Sundance Film Festival is in favor of keeping the event in Utah.
Bowen Yang, the “Wicked” actor and “Saturday Night Live” comedian, said Wednesday on his “Las Culturistas” podcast that his preference among the three cities vying to host the festival starting in 2027 is, “weirdly,” Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City, Yang told his co-host Matt Rogers, is “just 15 miles away” from Park City, and has “a little more infrastructure to support the size, the scale of the festival. And you just hop in a car and go to the ski lift and walk around Park City.”
That combined Salt Lake City/Park City experience, Yang said, “might be a really nice option, because it doesn’t totally strip the economy away from Park City.”
Rogers agreed. “You could still use Park City. … Maybe it wouldn’t have to feel completely different.”
The Salt Lake City/Park City option is one of three bids the Sundance Institute is considering once Park City’s contract with the institute expires after the 2026 festival. The other finalists are Boulder, Colorado, and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Talk of where Sundance will land in 2027 has dominated conversation among people attending the festival this year. Sundance officials have remained mum on the subject, saying a final decision has not been reached and that an announcement is expected in March or April.’
Yang’s endorsement was echoed by Abby Cox, Utah’s first lady, who said at a Women’s Leadership Celebration luncheon this week that Utah was a “perfect” partner for Sundance.
“Sundance is Utah, and Utah is Sundance,” she said.
Yang was attending Sundance to support a movie he’s in, “The Wedding Banquet.” The movie, directed by Andrew Ahn, tells of a lesbian couple (Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone) who agree to have one of them marry a gay immigrant (Han Gi-Chan) so he can get a green card. When the immigrant’s grandmother (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) shows up in New York unexpectedly, what was going to be a city hall wedding becomes a more lavish affair.
Yang, who plays the immigrant’s boyfriend, said screenwriter James Schamus — who co-wrote this version and the 1993 original directed by Ang Lee — is a proponent of the Cincinnati bid.
“He’s, like, ‘bring it to a city in the Midwest or somewhere where there’s just a great cross-section of all these different populations,’” Yang said.
Yang, who was born in Australia and moved to Colorado when he was 9, also said that “Boulder would be fun.”
Rogers said the Boulder bid would help Sundance maintain “the mountain vibes” that it’s developed in Park City over the last four decades.
“I wouldn’t want Sundance to not be in the Mountain Time region,” Rogers said. “Sundance is so huge for Mountain Time. It’s the one time of year people even think about Mountain Time if you’re not living in it already.”
Colorado is aggressively pursuing Sundance. A committee in the Colorado House overwhelmingly passed a bill Wednesday that would offer up to $34 million in refundable tax incentives to an international film festival that chooses to relocate to Colorado.
Another advantage of Utah that Yang discovered: Meeting Meredith and Seth Marks, from “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” at a Park City party.
“I looked them both in the eye and said, ‘Thank you for being on the best show on television, period,’” Yang said.
