Final Word On Sundance 2025: Fest Director Eugene Hernandez Dispels Naysayer But Addresses Challenges In Park City Postmortem
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Weeks after the indie film crowd left Park City, the box score on the Sundance Film Festival marketplace looks like this: a splashy auction and $15M WW deal by Neon on Together to start, followed by a handful of deals that moved sluggishly, with numbers that got smaller as leverage shifted from sellers to buyers.
A chorus of naysayers followed, though it bears noting that after a slow Toronto Film Festival deal pace last fall, the just completed Berlinale marketplace was also a snore.
No matter how splashily festival markets showcase acquisition titles, they can’t make buyers spend money on them in this moment of extreme uncertainty.
Does Sundance have fundamental flaws, or did the festival merely reflect that low ebb and possibly a new risk-averse normal in the shifting sands of the indie business?
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