The Sundance Film Festival is fighting a battle that’s been building for several years, and what it’s fighting for can be summed up in one word: relevance. What makes a Sundance movie relevant? In …
is fighting a battle that’s been building for several years, and what it’s fighting for can be summed up in one word: relevance. What makes a Sundance movie relevant? In a sense, the old criteria still hold. It’s some combination of box-office performance, awards cachet, and that buzzy, you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing of penetrating to the heart of what we used to call the conversation.
As a result, the awards season now represents an ever-thicker forest of competing companies, so that even the independent films thatcross over find it tougher to gain ultimate traction. There was a great deal of talk two years ago that “Eighth Grade,” a Sundance sensation that made $13 million at the box office, would receive an Oscar nomination for best picture; it should have, but didn’t.
I was there, and I saw them all: the leaden and twee “Happy, Texas,” which was picked up by Miramax in 1999 for a then-astronomical $10 million , or the excruciatingly contrived and mirthless young-boys-imitate-“First Blood” British comedy “Son of Rambow” , which was bought for $8 million , or “Tadpole” , a glib romantic farce that was like “The Graduate” remade by the Disney Channel, or the granddaddy of them all — “Little Miss Sunshine,” the scripted-by-index-card sitcom in indie clothing...
The $17.5 million that was ponied up for “Palm Springs” is part of a deal that will see the film distributed by Neon and Hulu. In other words, it has one foot in the old world and one in the new, and it’s anyone’s guess how that will play out. Properly placed in theaters, I think the picture could easily make $30 to $50 million.
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