Sphaera: Edition #3

By Eric Kohn

Movies have been made outside of Hollywood for over a century, but it took the Sundance Film Festival in Park City to solidify a market for them. In 1989, the overnight sensation of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape solidified the notion of an American independent film market. Sold to Miramax Films for $1 million, the modest, lo-fi erotic drama essentially recouped its budget in a matter of hours. Thus the mythology: Sundance as kingmaker, yes, but also a place that could make you whole. And when a major studio isn’t writing the checks, that makes all the difference.

The next two decades saw a flurry of filmmakers whose careers launched at the festival, from Quentin Tarantino to Ryan Coogler, but more significant was the commercial activity that surrounded their debuts. Miramax, October, Fox Searchlight, and Sony Pictures Classics were just a few of specialty buyers who contributed to Sundance buzz. The apex arrived two decades ago, when crowdpleaser Little Miss Sunshine sold to Searchlight for upwards of $10 million and went on to gross over $100 million worldwide. The mythology of Sundance emerged from a synergy of art and commerce, the idea that something exciting could premiere in the mountains and someone would pay money to get it out in the world.

With time, though, the commercial hysteria around Sundance became its Achilles’ heel. Streaming entities like Amazon and Netflix stormed the gates, their pockets lined with Silicon Valley wealth, and overinflated the price tags of movies that made them unattractive to smaller buyers. With time, the Sundance market contracted to the point where only a handful of significant breakouts were lucky enough to secure U.S. distribution during the festival. Sundance remained a launchpad for emerging talent on both sides of the camera, but the question became when, or if, anyone outside of Park City, Utah would get a chance to see it.

In 2020, an unexpected answer arrived as a potential silver lining in the midst of the pandemic: How about seeing it…now?

With in-person festival hype rendered impossible, Sundance joined the wave of festivals pivoting to online, creating a hub for streaming the lineup in all 50 states in the U.S. The Park City experience, which seemed remote and cost-prohibitive to most audiences outside of the industry, suddenly became accessible in their living rooms.

Within a few years, the pandemic receded and most festivals returned to their usual physical status. Sundance, however, held tight to a newly-fashioned hybrid entity. The decision has been controversial. On the one hand, the capacity to stream festival films democratizes their potential to reach audiences who might otherwise not get a chance to see them until months, if not years, down the line. Conversely, the unique energy of the physical screening experience, with the euphoria of a live crowd and talent at the front of the room for a Q&A, simply doesn’t translate to other environments. And so the new Sundance paradigm in recent years comes equipped with a choice: to stream or not to stream?

Programmers at the festival have simplified the equation: Any movies in the U.S. or World Cinema competition sections must accept that they will be available to stream on the Sundance platform after the first weekend of the 10-day festival. As a result, many of the higher-profile titles that arrive at the festival with distribution in play land in the Premieres section, where companies like A24 and Netflix can benefit from the vibe on the ground without diluting future audiences. Meanwhile, sales titles with big money in mind can exploit the hysteria of crowd reactions to drive up buyer interest.

Such is the case with this year’s Charli XCX mockumentary The Moment, which opens theatrically a few weeks after its Sundance debut in Premieres, while sales giant UTA will unleash its Olivia Wilde-Seth Rogen comedy The Invite in the same section. The exclusivity of Park City screenings, in its final year before moving to Boulder, belongs almost entirely to the highest-profile entries in the program. For almost everything else, there’s the stream. This year’s festival saw over 16,000 submissions from over 164 countries with only 105 projects accepted.

Ironically, the debilitating industry effects of COVID worked in Sundance’s favor in one key fashion: Streaming movies can be a lucrative business for festivals, if not the filmmakers. Sundance generates significant revenue from its online options and has no incentive to give up on it. Newer, younger audiences are discovering Sundance titles that might otherwise remain anonymous long after the festival takes place. My undergraduate students, many of whom never stepped foot in Park City, now frequently cite Sundance movies they watched online.

Moreover, the streaming availability of these titles during the festival hasn’t really hurt their distribution options. Of course, distribution doesn’t exactly mean success in today’s limited theatrical market. Last year’s significant U.S. competition breakouts included the queer comedy Twinless, which ultimately landed a home with Roadside Attractions, and the sexual assault drama Sorry, Baby, an A24 pickup. Those companies have lucrative output deals with Hulu and HBO Max, respectively, which means that their ultimate destinations are – you guessed it – streaming platforms. Meanwhile, Netflix picked up the mournful period piece Train Dreams and the hot-button police bodycam documentary Perfect Neighbor, while Apple nabbed the heartfelt Come and See Me in the Good Light. A year later, these movies remain celebrated and have garnered awards attention in the process.

This might suggest that streaming has become the default outcome for major Sundance hits, which certainly hits differently than the idea of a theatrical sensation gradually finding its audience around the world in the aftermath of Sundance validation. The festival was initially a rarified environment where you had to be there to attest to the best of the festival. Now, anyone can open their wallets for the opportunity to weigh in. That may help maximize attention on certain movies, but it can lead to backlash for others in the process.

In the future, Sundance might consider imposing a fee on competition films that choose to opt out of the streaming option, or otherwise determining some degree of flexibility around this decision. This would help Sundance justify its economic needs while giving creatives the agency to determine the scope of their premiere audience. On the other hand, festival programmers may not want to give up that control over the end result, in which case they may want to get more granular about which movies in the selection are best-equipped to benefit from a streaming versus in-person-only experience. In other words: Let the program, rather than rules, make the case.

So: To stream or not to stream? The future of independent film may lie with this question more than anything else. Whatever market remains for movies beyond the clutches of Hollywood, it has become fragmented, unpredictable, and subject to the wrong set of expectations. There is no universal right answer to chart a path to success.

On the other hand, there has never been a better moment for innovative, handcrafted release strategies. Yes, the theatrical business fluctuates like crazy and it can be challenging to engage audiences nationally with anything but the biggest studio releases. Each year, though, low-budget marvels like Bad Shabbos and Hundreds of Beavers worm their way into the theatrical market and eke out sizable returns that they accrue over the course of many months, snaking from city to city as they gather momentum. With a slow-and-steady theatrical presence, coupled with a savvy approach to international sales, smaller indies can map out a path to profitability over the course of a year or more. Always with the caveat: Sometimes!

Whether or not a movie streams during Sundance, patience is crucial for its theatrical prospects. Sundance remains a valuable launchpad, but overnight sensations have gone extinct. Maybe they set the wrong tone anyway. At the festival, the work begins; nobody can say for certain where it ends.

Each edition of Sphaera alternates between a story or interview from a respected journalist drawn from the worlds of art, film, fashion, photography, publishing, music or design and a handpicked Artist curating his/her Artist Selects to spotlight peers, legends, and up and comers.