Park City won’t have exact Sundance visitation and sales numbers for a few months, but Economic Development Manager Jenny Diersen said the 2024 festival went smoothly from a management perspective.
“I think it was an incredible year,” Diersen said. “All accounts we’ve heard, both from the community and internally, definitely one of the most successful Sundances we’ve seen in recent years. So we’re super excited about how everything went.”
Part of that success for the city involved getting visitors to use the Richardson Flat park and ride on the outskirts of town. It has 600 spaces, and the city provides free public transit from the parking lot.
“There were several days during the festival when we were less than 100 parking spots from filling that lot,” Diersen said. “Our teams actually started to have a conversation about what do we do if that lot fills, then where do we send people? So these are good problems to have and we want to applaud our community and our visitors for using that lot.”
Along with managing the film festival’s logistics, Diersen is also negotiating a new contract with the Sundance Institute.
Sundance’s contract with Park City expires in 2026, and festival officials have until October to initiate an extension.
Sundance CEO Joana Vicente addressed the deadline during a live podcast on Main Street with media journalist Matt Belloni. She said despite Park City long being the festival’s home, there are challenges.
“Accessibility is a challenge, cost is a challenge,” Vicente said. “We’ve been really excited about the programming that we’re doing in Salt Lake and really getting to a more diverse, younger audience… We’re also spending time doing a lot of strategic thinking, like, where can we be most relevant? What’s the role of the festival? What’s the role of the institute? How do we evolve in a really ever changing industry around us?”
Vicente said Sundance wants to continue to leverage its presence online. The film festival offered online screenings for the first time in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Diersen said the city is waiting to see Sundance’s plan.
I do think there’s a huge economic benefit to the festival," she said. "But I think more importantly and most importantly, it’s a community and cultural benefit to our city and to the people around us and the people that come here. I do not think the city would be the same without the festival here.”
Sundance has gradually cut back on Park City venues since the film festival returned in person in 2023. This year screenings at the Eccles Center, the largest venue with more than 1,000 seats, ended after the first week.
