The $196 Million Sundance Left Behind in Utah

A film festival changed states this year, and for once the receipts were public. Sundance ran out of Park City, Utah for more than four decades, and in January 2027 it opens in Boulder, Colorado instead. I am Harry Hayman, and a lot of what I spend my time on sits exactly where culture and public money meet in this city, which is why this particular move has been sitting on my desk for weeks. Cities lose things all the time. What makes this one worth reading closely is that somebody counted what was lost, and somebody else counted what it cost to take it. That almost never happens with culture. We will argue about a stadium for a year and a half. A film festival crossed a state line, and most of us read about it after the ink had dried.

What $196.1 million actually measured

The number everybody quoted came out of the Sundance Institute’s own attendance and economic impact report for the 2025 festival. That eleven day run put about $196.1 million into Utah’s economy, the biggest figure in the festival’s history, off 85,472 people through the doors. Roughly a third of them came from outside Utah, and that third did most of the economic work: visitor spending, not local ticket buying, is what moves a number like that. The same report counts more than $21 million in combined state and local tax revenue and around 2,600 jobs supported.

Those figures are not festival marketing. Utah has been measuring this for years through the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, which is the reason the state could answer the question at all when the question suddenly mattered. Most cities cannot.

There is a wrinkle in that report I keep coming back to, because it complicates the easy version of this story. Reporting from KPCW in Park City noted that while 2025 attendance jumped seventeen percent over 2024, in person attendance was still down almost forty percent against 2020. So the record dollar figure and a crowd well below where it used to be were sitting in the same document. The festival was earning more from fewer people. That is a business getting more efficient, and it is also a business that had already changed shape before it changed address.

I should be careful about one thing here, because I have seen this misquoted already. The $196.1 million belongs to 2025. The final Utah edition ran in early 2026, and its own impact report is not out. I am not going to hang a number on it that nobody has published.

What Boulder paid, and who paid it

Sundance Institute announced Boulder as the festival’s new home after a bidding process, and Colorado did not win it with enthusiasm. It won it with a package worth roughly $70 million, assembled in two halves.

The local half came from a coalition of the City of Boulder, Visit Boulder, the Boulder Chamber and the University of Colorado Boulder, committing about $34 million over ten years. Boulder Reporting Lab broke down what the city itself is putting in each year, and the shape of it is the interesting part. It is barely a cheque at all. It is renewable energy credits. Free transit passes on the HOP bus. City staff time for permits, setup, street closures and trash. Public safety staffing. Free parking and street closure help. Free use of city property for merchandise, food and ticket sales. Office space on Pearl Street. A full time city liaison whose job is to answer the festival’s phone.

The other half is state money. Colorado created a refundable tax credit specifically to land a festival like this one, through House Bill 25-1005, and Governor Jared Polis signed it into law with the Sundance decision already public. Thirty four million dollars of credit, written for a category of one.

Set the two numbers next to each other and the arithmetic is not subtle. Colorado is spending on the order of $70 million over a decade to acquire something that returned $196.1 million to another state in a single year. The Salt Lake Tribune worked through what Utah stands to lose when the reporting on the move began, and the honest answer is that nobody knows precisely, because some of that spending will find other reasons to happen in January and some of it simply will not.

Harry Hayman on culture that turns out to be portable

Here is the part that has been bothering me, and it is not really about Sundance.

We have a habit of describing cultural institutions as though they grew out of the ground. Forty years in one mountain town produces a certain confidence. Park City and Sundance were spoken about as a single thing, the way people speak about a city and its orchestra, or a neighbourhood and the venue that made it. Then a spreadsheet in another state came out ahead, and it turned out that four decades of association was a relationship, not a root system. Sundance was a Utah institution on a lease, and the lease came up.

Cities now bid for cultural anchors the way they bid for corporate headquarters and sports franchises. Same public money, same ten year commitments, same coalition of the mayor and the tourism bureau and the university. What is missing is the scrutiny. A stadium deal gets hearings, editorials, an opposition campaign and a ballot question. A festival package moves through a council agenda in an afternoon.

I want to be fair to Boulder here, because I think they did something sharp rather than something reckless. Film festivals are one of the few cultural acquisitions where the return can actually be measured, and where the visitors arrive in a defined window and spend in a defined radius. If you are going to bid public money for culture at all, bidding it for the thing with a published impact report is the defensible version.

What Philadelphia is already spending on film

None of this is foreign to us. Pennsylvania runs a film production tax credit worth twenty five percent of qualified spend, rising to thirty percent for productions that meet the requirements at a qualified production facility. The Greater Philadelphia Film Office works those incentives alongside location scouting and permitting for anybody shooting here. In February the Shapiro administration announced $117 million in credits across fifty nine film and television productions, projecting $1.11 billion into the economy and more than 11,700 jobs.

So Philadelphia is already a bidder. We just do not usually describe it that way, because production credits feel like industrial policy and festivals feel like culture, and we file them in different drawers in our heads.

Meanwhile the Philadelphia Film Society keeps building the other half of the equation, the part that cannot be bought by another state because it is made of buildings and habits. WHYY covered its work on the Chestnut Street theatre, and its festival programming continues to put local filmmakers on Philadelphia screens every October. That is slower and less dramatic than a $70 million package, and it is also much harder for anyone to pick up and drive away.

The question I cannot put down

What do we call permanent in this city that is actually contracted?

I do not ask that as a warning about anybody in particular, and I am not predicting that anything is leaving. I ask it because Utah could answer the value question when it was put to them and most places cannot. When Sundance became a live conversation, Utah had years of measurement to point at, and it still lost, but at least the argument was possible. If a cultural anchor here were ever in play, would we have a published number to defend it with, or would we be assembling one in a hurry while somebody else’s council was already voting?

Culture is infrastructure. That is a thing I say often enough that people repeat it back to me. Infrastructure gets inventoried, valued, maintained and budgeted for. Right now we mostly do the first three for roads and the last one for stadiums, and we do all four for very little of what actually makes people want to be in a city. A festival moved across the Rockies for $70 million and gave every city in America a free look at the price list. The least we can do is read it.

What $196.1 million actually measured

What Boulder paid, and who paid it

Harry Hayman on culture that turns out to be portable

What Philadelphia is already spending on film

The question I cannot put down

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