Sundance’s final Park City curtain call: a tearful Wilde premiere and a festival in transition

Snow swirled outside the Eccles Center as Olivia Wilde stepped into the light, blinking back tears. The crowd packed into the 1,270-seat theater had just given her new film, The Invite, a lengthy standing ovation on a frigid January night in Park City. Wilde, joined onstage by co-stars Edward Norton and Seth Rogen, tried to thank the audience but paused, visibly overwhelmed.

The applause was for the sharp, awkward comedy about sex, marriage and middle age. But in Park City, where the Sundance Film Festival is holding its final Utah edition before decamping to Colorado next year, the ovation also felt like something else: a farewell.

A “last hurrah” in Utah

The 2026 Sundance Film Festival, running Jan. 22 through Feb. 1 in Park City and Salt Lake City with an at-home online program in its final days, has been framed by organizers as a “last hurrah” in Utah. After more than four decades in the state—and just months after the death of founder Robert Redford—the festival is preparing to relocate to Boulder in 2027, a shift that carries cultural, economic and symbolic weight for both the institute and its longtime mountain home.

“This year is different. There’s a sense of closure in the air,” one longtime attendee said in Park City, echoing a sentiment that has turned shuttle rides and coffee lines into impromptu nostalgia sessions. “You feel like you’re saying goodbye.”

Festival leadership has leaned into that mood. A Park City Legacy program in the second half of the festival features digital restorations and anniversary screenings of Sundance touchstones such as Little Miss Sunshine, Half Nelson, Mysterious Skin, House Party and Saw. At Sundance Mountain Resort, the Utah arts enclave Redford developed, filmmakers gathered for a tribute brunch and a screening of the actor-director’s 1969 ski drama Downhill Racer. Volunteers and staff have been handing out buttons reading, “Thank you Bob!”

Redford, who founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 and helped transform a regional showcase into one of the world’s most influential film festivals, died Sept. 16, 2025, at age 89 at his home in Utah. Tributes at this year’s event have repeatedly referred to him as a “godfather of independent cinema,” crediting his labs and festival with launching careers and films as varied as Reservoir Dogs, sex, lies, and videotape, Little Miss Sunshine, Get Out, CODA and 20 Days in Mariupol.

Why Sundance is moving to Boulder

While the institute’s year-round artist labs will remain in Utah, the festival itself is moving. The Sundance Institute announced in March 2025 that Boulder would become the festival’s new host city starting in 2027, following an 18-month search that considered several locations, including Salt Lake City and Cincinnati.

Acting Sundance Institute Chief Executive Amanda Kelso called Boulder “an art town, tech town, mountain town, and college town,” describing it as “the ideal location for the festival to grow.”

Organizers have cited a combination of practical and philosophical reasons for the move. Park City’s limited theater capacity and soaring lodging costs have made it increasingly difficult to accommodate tens of thousands of visitors each January, including filmmakers, industry executives, press and volunteers. At the same time, Sundance leaders have said they weighed potential homes against the institute’s “ethos and equity values,” a phrase many took as a nod to political and cultural alignment in an era when state laws and local climates can shape the experience of artists and audiences.

Colorado officials aggressively courted the festival. The state approved a package of tax credits estimated at $34 million over 10 years tied to Sundance’s relocation and related production activity. Gov. Jared Polis hailed the decision as “a key economic driver, job creator and important contributor to our thriving culture,” promising a boost for small businesses from restaurants to hotels.

Utah leaders expressed disappointment. Gov. Spencer Cox said he believed Sundance would “regret leaving Utah,” arguing the state had offered a competitive package and that the festival’s identity was deeply rooted in its snow-covered slopes and red rock canyons.

Economists and local business owners in Park City have warned that the loss of the 11-day event—which typically fills hotels during a winter shoulder period and draws extensive media attention—will be felt across the region. Some have begun exploring alternative events to fill the calendar gap in future years, though nothing on Sundance’s scale has been announced.

Festival director Eugene Hernandez has worked to reassure Utah stakeholders that the institute’s presence will not vanish from the state. The labs and artist programs at Sundance Mountain Resort, he has emphasized, remain central to Redford’s original mission of nurturing emerging filmmakers far from Hollywood, even as the red-carpet marketplace moves east.

A year defined by premieres—and goodbyes

On the ground this year, the focus has been on the films—and on the marquee premieres that seem to embody both Sundance’s history and its evolving identity.

Wilde’s The Invite, an English-language remake of Spanish director Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs, is one of the festival’s most high-profile narrative debuts. Co-written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, the 107-minute film stars Wilde and Rogen as a couple in a strained marriage who accept a dinner invitation from their upstairs neighbors, played by Penélope Cruz and Norton. Over the course of a single evening in a cramped apartment, talk of open relationships and weekly sex parties forces all four characters to confront unspoken resentments, desires and fears.

“It was really important to us to make a film for adults about adult problems that could still feel fun,” Wilde told the opening-night audience, acknowledging the challenge of balancing farce, tension and the pain of potential divorce in the same space.

Norton, speaking onstage, praised Wilde’s dual role. “To direct a film of this complexity while giving such a seamless and inspiring performance is no small feat,” he said, as the crowd cheered.

Early reviews out of Park City have described The Invite as a stylish, sharply written comedy with meticulously crafted dialogue and have called it Wilde’s most mature and polished directorial effort to date. For distributors and streamers watching from the theater’s back rows, the warm reception was also a test of whether there is still an appetite for mid-budget, R-rated, performance-driven comedies in a marketplace dominated by franchise films and shoestring indies.

A very different crowd filled Eccles the next afternoon for the world premiere of Cookie Queens, a 91-minute documentary in the festival’s Family Matinee section. Directed by Alysa Nahmias, the film follows four Girl Scouts as they navigate the high-pressure weeks of cookie season, vying to become top sellers in what the movie describes as an $800 million cookie economy.

Executive produced by Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, through their Archewell Productions banner, Cookie Queens looks at the long hours, ambitious sales targets and family expectations that surround the annual cookie drive. It examines how lessons in entrepreneurship and leadership intersect with questions about childhood, labor and self-worth.

According to festival staff, the film received one of the longer standing ovations at this year’s Sundance, unusual for a festival that does not typically time such displays as obsessively as Cannes or Venice.

Sundance programmer Stephanie Owens called the documentary “a joyous, heartwarming, utterly sweet ride that cheers on the girls’ grit and ingenuity,” while also acknowledging “the very real pressure cookie season can put on children and families.”

Harry and Meghan walked the red carpet in Park City the day before the premiere, posing for photos with Nahmias, Hernandez and filmmaker Amy Redford, Robert Redford’s daughter. It was the couple’s first appearance at Sundance and came shortly after renewed headlines over Harry’s legal battles with British tabloids.

Meghan, a former Girl Scout whose mother served as a troop leader, has said the project felt “absolutely irresistible” and described Cookie Queens as “one of the most powerful and meaningful depictions of an American tradition.” In interviews around the premiere, she has spoken about her own memories of cookie sales, identifying Thin Mints as her favorite, while Harry has mentioned a preference for shortbread and Samoas.

The film aligns with the Sussexes’ recent media projects focused on women’s empowerment, youth and mental health. It also highlights the kind of socially attuned, youth-centered nonfiction that has become increasingly central to Sundance programming, even as star-driven projects draw much of the outside attention.

What comes next

Beyond the premieres, the 2026 lineup underscores the festival’s attempt to straddle continuity and change. The Beyond Film series brings together figures such as Ava DuVernay, Richard Linklater, Billie Jean King, Nicole Holofcener, Elijah Wood, Ta-Nehisi Coates and horror director James Wan for talks on topics from creative freedom to social justice. International and U.S. competition sections feature first-time directors alongside veterans returning with new work, mirroring Sundance’s original mandate to give emerging voices a platform.

What will change, starting next year, is the view outside the theaters. In Boulder, organizers plan to center the festival around downtown and the Pearl Street Mall, with additional events on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, including major presentations at Macky Auditorium. The city’s population of roughly 100,000, its existing arts community and its mix of tech startups and research institutions were key selling points in the institute’s selection process.

Back in Park City, some festivalgoers say they plan to follow Sundance to Colorado. Others, especially Utah locals and longtime volunteers, are less certain, describing 2026 as their final pilgrimage to Main Street during festival week.

As the snowbanks along Park Avenue melt into slush and banners begin to come down, the question hanging over this year’s Sundance is less whether the festival can thrive in Boulder—organizers and state officials insist it can—than what will be lost, and what will carry over, when the lights go down in a new mountain town.

For now, the images from Eccles linger: Wilde wiping her eyes as the applause refuses to fade; Girl Scouts in green sashes clutching boxes of Thin Mints outside the same doors; audiences standing to salute films they have just discovered, in a place that helped teach the movie world how much those moments can matter.