Sundance Wraps Up Its In-Person Return With Mega-Deals, High Anxiety and Controversy Over Captioning

On Jan. 22, the sales agents of WME Independent braced themselves for an all-night negotiation at the Sundance Film Festival. Once a staple of major film festivals, where million-dollar price tags soar as high as the altitude in the Utah mountains, these kind of marathon bidding wars had gone digital during the pandemic, or disappeared nearly entirely. For the first time since 2020, the agents stocked their chalet with pizza bites, cookies and sugary soda to fuel these talks. Their mission was to find the right studio home for “Theater Camp,” a backstage send-up that scored a raucous reception at… Read Full Article