In a parallel universe, the 2027 Sundance Film Festival will start with Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, welcoming some 2,500 movie lovers seated at Salt Lake City’s Eccles Theater — launching an era in which Utah’s capital becomes the permanent home of America’s premier independent film event.
That’s the scenario Utah business and political leaders hoped would emerge from their efforts to land a 10-year commitment from the Sundance Institute to relocate its flagship festival to Salt Lake City after more than four decades in nearby Park City.
That Utah bid failed — so, in this universe, on Jan. 21, 2027, Hernandez or another institute official will welcome attendees in Sundance’s new host city: Boulder, Colorado.
The state’s bid organizers compiled the details of Utah’s proposal in a 134-page bound volume that showcased its bid for Sundance officials. Amid the gorgeous photography of Utah mountains and city views, and archival images of Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford, the book is a blueprint for a Utah-based Sundance Film Festival that could have been.
(Sean P. Means | The Salt Lake Tribune) The state of Utah produced a 134-page bound volume to showcase its bid to keep the Sundance Film Festival in the state.
Sundance announced in April 2024 that it was accepting proposals to relocate the festival from Park City when the institute’s contract with the ski town ended after the 2026 festival. Complaints had mounted that the festival had become too big for the small tourist haven, and that Park City’s accommodations had grown too expensive for the young filmmakers and audiences Sundance was seeking to attract.
Sundance weeded out dozens of interested cities, narrowing the choice to three bids: Boulder, Cincinnati and a Utah bid representing Salt Lake City and Park City.
[Related: Life after Sundance: Can Utah create a new film festival? Should it try?]
Utah’s bid proposed keeping a few screenings in Park City, the festival’s home since 1981, while moving the bulk of the event to downtown Salt Lake City — presenting a mix of urban sophistication and ski-town charm.
“That could have been really, really cool,” said Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson.
Sundance, Wilson said, is “going to miss out on the creative opportunity that Park City had willingly shown to Salt Lake County, while we were coming up with a new way of blending that legacy — the spirit, the purpose, the Park City environment — with a new opportunity in Salt Lake.”
Running the numbers
According to the bid book, Utah’s state and local governments currently allocate $2.755 million in cash a year to keep the Sundance Film Festival going. The bid promised another $2.275 million in public-sector money each year, for a total of $5.53 million a year.
A lot of that increase, $1.625 million year over year, was in the form of a $3.5 million expenditure the Utah Legislature carved out for Sundance in next year’s state budget. After Sundance announced it would move to Boulder, Gov. Spencer Cox vowed to call a special legislative session to take back that money — and, potentially, use it to kick-start a new film festival in Utah.
After the Boulder announcement, the Salt Lake County Council voted to rescind a $150,000 allocation to Sundance for the 2026 festival — which still will be held in Park City and in some Salt Lake City venues. Salt Lake County still will provide some $130,000 to the festival through the Zoo, Arts and Parks tax. The county also operates one of Sundance’s traditional Salt Lake City venues, the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, and that isn’t expected to change in 2026.
The current in-kind contributions from state and local governments are now worth $3.72 million, and the bid proposal offered up another $2.93 million a year — for a total of $6.65 million a year.
Those in-kind contributions include the festival volunteers, who the bid’s writers estimate provide some $1.7 million in donated labor.
One of the interesting in-kind contributions in the bid was pledged by Visit Salt Lake, which had offered to spend $500,000 in marketing and transportation. Specifically, Visit Salt Lake was set to arrange a free shuttle bus to take festival attendees on the 40-minute ride from downtown Salt Lake City to Park City.
Utah’s proposal also accounted for pledges from private backers. Current private contributions amount to $1.21 million a year in cash and $1.55 million a year from in-kind contributions. The bid’s creators were proposing an additional $2 million from in-kind funding every year.
Scott Anderson, the retired CEO of Zions Bank who worked on the private-sector part of the state’s bid, said he also had received pledges from private sources (he would not say whom), for a $10 million one-time cash gift for Sundance once it signed a contract to keep the festival in Utah.
(Al Hartmann | Salt Lake Tribune) The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City, decorated for the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
Where it might have happened
The likely large showpiece theaters for the festival, the bid suggested, were in downtown Salt Lake City: the Eccles Theater, the Capitol Theatre and Abravanel Hall. That last one has some Sundance history. Abravanel hosted the festival’s opening night gala from 1997 to 2003, premiering such movies as “Sliding Doors” and “The Laramie Project.”
Midsize downtown venues the bid offered included the Rose Wagner, the Broadway Centre Cinemas, the Nancy Tessman Auditorium at downtown’s Salt Lake City Library — all prior Sundance theaters — and concert spaces at The Depot and The State Room. For smaller venues, the proposal listed the Megaplex at The Gateway, Clark Planetarium, The Leonardo, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the black box theaters at the Eccles and the Rose.
Three major downtown hotels were listed as possible sites for gala events: The Asher Adams, the Hyatt Regency and the Hotel Monaco.
All of these downtown locations are within walking distance of one other and of several major hotels. The city also had floated the idea of closing some streets, like Main Street or 300 South, for the festival’s duration.
An intriguing suggestion was to open venues on the University of Utah campus, including the Dumke auditorium at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Hayes Christensen Theatre at the U.’s School of Dance. The Grand Theater at Salt Lake Community College’s South City campus was also listed as a possible venue.
The venues listed for the portion of the festival that would have remained in Park City are familiar to Sundance regulars: The “other” Eccles Theatre, The Ray Theatre, the Egyptian Theatre and the Park City Library.
Utah also proposed adding two free events to the festival’s mix.
One new event would have been a “student film conference” at the U., with well-known filmmakers and Sundance Institute lab fellows as guest lecturers for the 3,000 film and digital arts students at higher-education institutions in and near Salt Lake City.
The other was more ambitious: a “film and tech innovation conference,” aimed at attracting 20,000 attendees to talk about “next-generation technologies,” such as artificial intelligence, in creating modern media.
The proposal said that private funders were ready to pump $2 million in cash, and another $500,000 from in-kind contributions, into making the technology conference happen at the Salt Palace Convention Center.
Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith — the head of the Smith Entertainment Group, which owns the Utah Jazz and the Utah Hockey Club — wrote a letter, included in the bid, to pitch that tech gathering. Smith wrote that the conference would be supported by Utah’s Silicon Slopes initiative and could draw such big names as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Netflix’s Reed Hastings.
“By partnering with Sundance,” Smith wrote, “we can create an even more compelling destination for industry leaders and innovators.”
The Utah bid book ends with a note to Sundance officials that evokes the nonprofit’s founder.
“Robert Redford saw something in this landscape that kept him here,” the Utah officials wrote. “The peaks soared high, the rivers ran deep, and imaginations went unbound. There is something about this high mountain desert that fuels creativity for all who walk upon it.“
The note ends: “Sundance started here for a reason. And we see many more reasons it should stay.”
