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Sundance Is Moving to Boulder, and It Is a Bigger Deal Than People Realize
Published September 14, 2026
Sundance is leaving Park City after forty years and moving to Boulder in January 2027 — with venues on the CU campus.
If you have not been paying attention to this one, here is the short version. The Sundance Film Festival, the biggest independent film festival in the country, is leaving Park City, Utah after more than forty years and moving to Boulder. The first Boulder edition runs January 21 through 31, 2027. Some of the venues are on our campus.
I want to explain why that is a much bigger deal than it sounds like at first.
Wait, how did Boulder get Sundance?
Honestly, nobody expected this. Sundance opened up a search for a new home in the spring of 2024 and more than a hundred places raised their hand. That got cut to six cities, then to three: Boulder, Cincinnati, and a joint Park City and Salt Lake City bid.
Boulder should not have won that. Cincinnati is a metro area of two million people. Salt Lake had forty years of history and the home field advantage. Boulder has about 100,000 residents and no film industry at all.
Boulder won anyway, announced on March 27, 2025. The deal runs ten years, and the city and its partners put together $34 million in incentives to land it. Sundance's leadership described Boulder as an art town, a tech town, a mountain town, and a college town all at the same time, which is a pretty good description of the place if you have spent any time here.
That last part, the college town part, is where we come in.
What it means for the city
For context on scale: the 2025 festival in Park City drew about 85,000 people in person. Boulder is going to absorb a version of that every January for at least the next decade.
Downtown is the heart of it. Venues are clustered around the Pearl Street Mall and the theaters nearby, with additional locations on the CU campus. If you have walked Pearl Street on a normal afternoon, picture it with premieres, press, and a few thousand people in line for a movie that nobody in the world has seen yet.
Cities do not usually get to change what they are known for. Boulder has been the Flatirons, the trails, and the university for fifty years. Starting in 2027, it is also the place American independent film shows up every winter. That is a genuinely rare thing to watch happen to a town.
What it means for students
This is the part I actually care about.
CU is the festival's official university partner. That is not a logo on a poster. The university and the Sundance Institute are building out a year of academic and creative programming together, and several official festival venues sit on campus. Macky Auditorium, the concert hall you walk past on the way to class, is on the list.
The festival also lands right around the start of spring semester. So for a CU student, this is not a thing you travel to. It is a thing that happens where you already live, in the middle of a normal January.
A few things worth knowing:
Film, media studies, theater, and journalism students are getting a festival of this size dropped in their backyard. That is access to filmmakers, panels, and industry people that students at most schools would pay to fly across the country for.
You do not have to be a film major for it to matter. Festivals run on volunteers, and a first year in a new city needs a lot of them. Watch for those announcements in the fall.
And plenty of it is just going to be fun. Premieres, Q and As, people you have seen in movies eating lunch on Pearl Street. In January. Two blocks from your apartment.
What we still do not know
To be straight with you: the film lineup is not announced until around December 2026, and the details on student tickets, volunteer roles, and campus programming are still coming together. Anyone telling you exactly how a CU student will experience Sundance 2027 is guessing.
There is also a real question about whether an eleven day festival is great for a town this size or just makes January crowded. Ask a Park City local how they felt about it and you will get a complicated answer. Boulder is about to find out for itself.
One more thing worth saying
Robert Redford, who started the Sundance Institute in 1981 and turned a small Park City festival into the front door of American independent film, died in September 2025, a few months after the move to Boulder was announced. He never got to see it here.
So the 2027 festival is a first in a few ways at once. First year in a new city, first without its founder, first outside the mountain town everyone associated with the name. Boulder is where the next chapter starts.
Come see the town before it changes
We are biased, but this is a good moment to actually look at Boulder. The city is about to become a bigger deal nationally, and the version of it you see on a walk down The Hill right now is the version students have known for decades.
If you want to see what CU and Boulder are really like, from someone who lives here, book our Signature Private Tour. It is $150 flat for your whole family, led by a current student, and it covers The Hill, the housing, the food, and the parts of student life the official campus tour does not get to.