Amazon nabbed one of the biggest deals of this year’s Sundance Film Fest when it bought the rights to “The Big Sick” for about $12 million.
YouTube got odd looks when it began showing up at the Sundance Film Festival five years ago.
This year, nobody bats an eye.
“YouTube, Netflix and others investing in digital creations [means] the output is on par with what is coming out of Hollywood,” said Jamie Byrne, director of creators for YouTube, which screened its first original movie at Sundance this year and has sponsored the fest’s short-film program for half a decade. “Digital creators are getting seen. ”
For 33 years, the movie industry has come to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to show off some of its shiniest independent films. Bidders come to land the rights to next year’s Oscars catnip. Thanks to online video companies’ swelling budgets and to consumers watching more media online, the distinction between films made for the big screen and those destined for a touchscreen is fading away. And this year, Sundance saw digital upstarts grab leading roles.
For starters, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and others screened more projects at the fest this year than online natives have ever before. In addition, this year’s programming played right into digital bidders’ hands. Traditional buyers, hunting for movies with both critical praise and mainstream appeal, complained the latest slate of movies was “aggressively uncommercial” — with little mass-market appeal. Online companies, on the other hand, tend to delight in titles that resonate with niche audiences, so Sundance provided them with plenty of projects ripe for the picking.
Netflix, with its $6 billion content budget, tends to have the greatest number of original titles on offer.
