At the end of last year’s Sundance film festival there may have been some concerns over the quality of films but there was less worry over the quantity of deals. As I wrote last year’s wrap, there had already been major big-money sales – $10m for A Real Pain, $17m for It’s What’s Inside, $15m for My Old Ass, $5m for Presence – some smaller ones – Thelma, Ghostlight, Ibelin, Daughters, Skywalkers and Kneecap – and in the 48 hours after there were even more – Dìdi to Focus and Will & Harper to Netflix. Post-strikes it was a reassuringly robust marketplace with gaps that needed to be filled but just a year later, things are looking far less comforting.
There were even more questions over quality – I heard many a grumble in the press line over a lack of breakouts – but even so, as of writing, there have been only four deals confirmed, a worryingly dour result for what’s seen as one of America’s most important markets. Films with sellable names like Jennifer Lopez, Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch and Josh O’Connor and some of the best-reviewed titles remain without distribution.
A sense of cautiousness might explain why the most immediately competitive title was a horror film, still one of the only close-to-sure genres in Hollywood. That film was Together, a slickly made body horror picked up by Neon for a reported $17m, after fighting off competition from A24. It stars the real-life husband-and-wife duo Alison Brie and Dave Franco as a codependent couple who find themselves drawn to each other even more when they stumble upon a gnarly infection that forces their flesh together. While it would have been an easy yes in any year, we are now living in a post-Substance world, the Demi Moore-fronted sleeper scoring both strong box office and surprise Oscar nominations. While Together is unlikely to be an awards darling, a swiftly announced August release date should make it a solid late summer hit.
The film was also one of the most universally liked of the festival (it’s maintained a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), a distinction also shared by another buzzy sale, albeit on a far smaller scale. The comedian Eva Victor’s debut Sorry, Baby had already seemed like a perfect fit for A24 before it even showed interest – it’s produced by Barry Jenkins, who has a relationship with the company after Moonlight and Aftersun, it’s a writer-director-actor showcase of someone known for their poppy virality and it’s an unusual #MeToo narrative loosely similar to I May Destroy You. It was an $8m pickup for the distributor who will probably give it a low-key awards push later in the year. The Oscar conversation will also likely include another big sale of the festival, the period drama Train Dreams which was bought by Netflix for a figure that’s reportedly in the high teen millions. The film stars Joel Edgerton and the recent two-time Oscar nominee Felicity Jones as a couple at the start of the 20th century living in the American west and boasts the same creative team as Sing Sing. Across the board praise for Edgerton should see him become a strong best actor contender.
A rather less surefire best actress contender also emerged in the first weekend in the unlikely shape of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a anxiety-fueled dark comedy about motherhood with a career-best performance from a remarkable Rose Byrne. The film, from the writer-director Mary Bronstein, already has A24 behind it, but it’s a divisive, deliberately difficult watch that could prove too alienating for many voters.
The festival kicked off with two narrative features that landed at opposite ends of the spectrum. The director Sophie Hyde, who’d scored Sundance success with 52 Tuesdays, Animals and the Emma Thompson-fronted Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, stumbled with her latest, the personal drama Jimpa. Despite strong performances from Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, the film struggled to impress critics on the ground and will be a tough one to sell. But then later that night, the Straight Up writer-director-actor James Sweeney found himself the talk of the town after his second feature, the wonderfully indefinable Twinless, premiered to rave reviews. A twisty, genre-shifting mix of grief drama, Hitchcock thriller and dark comedy, it’s perhaps the film’s unusual nature that’s left it unsold at this stage given how strong the response has been (another 100% rating that also picked up the audience award). The film drew controversy at the tail-end of the festival after leaks led to it being pulled from the digital platform that allows for consumers to rent certain titles. Sex scenes including its star Dylan O’Brien (who gave one of the festival’s most impressive breakout performances) plus major plot reveals were shared on social media, the second film (after a doc about the tragic singer Selena Quintanilla) to be leaked and then pulled.
The app had been introduced as an inevitable addition during Covid times so journalists could cover the festival remotely but given how it became a strong money-maker for the festival (a reported half a million people used the portal in 2021) it stayed ever since. But with the leaks, especially as many of the films available are seeking buyers, questions remain over whether it will return next year at least in the current iteration.
Many more high-profile films chose to steer clear of the app, which was perhaps wisest for Kiss of the Spider Woman, a Jennifer Lopez-led musical restaging of the prison-set queer drama. The Broadway adaptation’s many splashy technicolor setpieces would have surely landed online within minutes but while Lopez, who responded tearfully to a standing ovation, received praise for her singing and dancing, the film was met with mostly mixed reviews. It’s a tough proposition for many buyers even with the musical resurgence (Wicked, it ain’t) although I could see a smart distributor position it for a Lopez Golden Globe nod.
An even tougher sell, with even rougher reviews, was led by another of the festival’s bigger stars, the Benedict Cumberbatch-fronted and Film 4-funded grief horror-drama The Thing With Feathers. Based on the much-loved novella, the film couldn’t capitalise on a packed-out Saturday night premiere, reminding too many of previous Sundance hit The Babadook. The night before also saw Cumberbatch’s Henry Sugar co-star Dev Patel receive similarly spotty reviews for the Wales-set folk horror Rabbit Trap, yet they were fawning in comparison to those that met Brit Himesh Patel’s comedy Bubble & Squeak, a cabbage-smuggling comedy that was widely viewed as the worst of the fest. Another well-known British actor who had more success was Ben Whishaw, who came with his second film under the Passages director Ira Sachs, the talky two-hander Peter Hujar’s Day. It had a warm reception but given how much smaller it is than their last film together (it’s essentially a 76-minute art film), it sold to a much smaller distributor in Sideshow and Janus Films.
Many of the buzzier titles, like the aforementioned Sorry, Baby and Twinless, managed to attract attention without such stars attached and with less attention-demanding premiere slots. On Tuesday evening, even as many critics had already left, the celebrity culture thriller Lurker quickly became one of the festival’s most enthusiastically received titles, the first-time writer-director Alex Russell’s dark tale of a retail worker attaching himself to a musician feeling like one of the easier commercial sells of the festival. It was a genre hit unlike the disastrously received Opus, another story set in the music industry that was a rare A24 miss, a film that most people were quick to criticise on the ground.
For while some films did attract applause, it was mostly of the polite kind. There was no Get Out or Past Lives or Little Miss Sunshine this year, at least not on the narrative side of things. The delayed Oscar nominations landed just as the festival was kicking off and while the best picture 10 was lacking a Sundance premiere (A Real Pain just missed out), the documentary category featured four of them. It was a fitting kick-off for a festival that was widely viewed as more impressive for docs again with standouts including films on horrendous conditions in an Alabama prison, the troubled history of To Catch a Predator, the loves and life of Jeff Buckley, the rise of anti-trans rhetoric, the Russia-Ukraine war through the eyes of those fighting it, bigoted book bans in America and a Russian teacher dealing with life under Putin. But it’s been similarly dismal commercially without any sold to date, a potentially concerning sign of wider fears over content that might be deemed too controversial under a rightwing president.
In 2023, two major docs, Union and No Other Land, ended up without any distribution with many speculating that their themes – the first on Amazon’s many labor issues and the second on Israeli violence and occupation in the West Bank – frightened buyers. While the latter still scored an Oscar nomination despite its lack of formal release, this years festival taking place just days after the inauguration added an unmistakable layer of caution to an already caution-heavy marketplace, a feeling that taking any added commercial or political risk is going to be even harder at such a volatile time.
