The movie industry is processing news that its January vacations will be in Colorado instead of Utah starting in 2027 — and the first batch of Hollywood veterans to comment say they’re glad.
Tom Bernard, co-president of the movie distribution company Sony Pictures Classics, said he was “thrilled” with Thursday’s news that the Sundance Film Festival will leave Park City, Utah, for Boulder, Colorado, starting in 2027.
“The new audience they’re going to run into in Boulder is amazing,” Bernard told the British trade publication Screen Daily.
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Bernard, whose company has recently bought Sundance movies such as “The Persian Version” and “Between the Temples,” said he’s excited to see the festival set up in a college town. Boulder is home to the University of Colorado’s main campus.
“You’re going to have 10,000 new students every year available for the film festival. You’ll have closer to what Sundance had back in the early ‘80s,” Bernard said. “Sundance will have to step in to program for this new audience.”
Cassian Elwes, a producer and former sales agent who has debuted movies like “Mudbound” at Sundance, told Screen Daily that Boulder was “a good choice,” but that he “can’t help but feel sad that the relocation of Sundance is the end of an era that was filled with so many incredible memories.”
Another indie-film veteran, Ted Hope, told Screen Daily that “Sundance is such a strong institution I honestly don’t think it matters where they move, provided they have true support and alignment of the community.”
Producer William Rosenfeld told the industry website IndieWire that moving Sundance from Utah to Colorado will be an adjustment.
“Sundance and Park City go together like Cannes and Cannes,” said Rosenfeld, who sold a 2024 Sundance movie, the body-swap thriller “It’s What’s Inside,” to Netflix for $17 million. “Anything other than Park City was going to be a little bit of a bummer and hard to get the head around.”
However, compared the other finalists, Salt Lake City and Cincinnati, Rosenfeld said, “Boulder feels like the best place to go if not Park City.”
Eric Kohn, who covered Sundance for 20 years when he worked for IndieWire, said Boulder represents “stability” that the arts nonprofit needs.
“Sundance could have found ways to survive in Salt Lake City or reinvented its appeal in Cincinnati, but Boulder was always the safest choice,” Kohn, now the artistic director of the nonprofit Southampton Playhouse movie theater on Long Island, told IndieWire. “It won’t alienate the industry stalwarts — including some who have voices on the board — and it provides a sufficient degree of familiarity to keep the brand intact.”
Some industry commentators have mocked Utah for losing Sundance and put the blame on the Utah Legislature’s conservative politics.
Sundance officials have said Utah’s political actions — such as a just-enacted ban on pride flags in public buildings — were not a factor in the move to relocate. Those same officials have, however, cited Boulder’s “ethos” and “welcoming community” among reasons that city was chosen.
Longtime Hollywood commentator Roger Friedman, in his “Showbiz 411″ column, noted that Sundance’s decision was announced the same day Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill that will make Utah the first state in the union to ban fluoride in public water systems.
Friedman wrote that with Sundance’s decision, “the appeal of Colorado includes moving from a backward red state to a forward-thinking blue one. … When they say a movie is ‘jaw-dropping,’ it won’t be literal.”
On the pop-culture site AV Club, writer William Hughes ridiculed Cox’s proposal to ask the Legislature to shift the $3.5 million lawmakers earmarked for Sundance to a yet-to-be-created Utah film festival.
Hughes sarcastically wrote that Cox was “sounding, in no way, like someone who just got very publicly dumped,” and that it will be interesting to watch “independent film flourish in an environment where lawmakers are actively condemning you for things like ‘promoting alternative lifestyles.’”
That last comment was a dig at Utah state Sen. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, who posted on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that “Sundance promotes porn” and that he’d be happy to say goodbye to the festival that started in Utah back in 1978.
Hughes also chided McCay for dropping a 1995 pop-culture reference. McCay, Hughes wrote, “said ‘Bye, Felicia’ in 2025, which is a whole separate category of public embarrassment.”
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