Change of Dates for Sundance Film Festival in 2015 to Avoid MLK Weekend
In 2015 Sundance Film Festival will be celebrating it’s 34th year of being held in Park City, Utah. The festival has been held there since 1981 and was apparently moved from a summer running to a winter running in order to attract more Hollywood attention to the ski resort during the winter months.
The Sundance Institute and Park City have been in discussion to extend their contact, in order to keep the festival in the Utah town and avoid the festival schedule overlapping with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.
Park City hosts the festival annually, however it markets itself as a ‘go-to ski resort’, and the overlapping of the festival and the holiday weekend is proving to cost the town valuable income. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that “The overlap has cost the city an estimated $4.2 million a year in ski revenue on that three-day weekend.”
Ski town of Park City
The schedule for 2014 has already been decided and so the festival dates will remain the same, meaning it will overlap with the holiday weekend. It will run from January 16th to the 26th next year. However in 2015 the festival will start slightly later, beginning on January 22nd and lasting until February 1st.
The festival is a generator of income for the ski town, Park Record note that “In 2013 the festival reportedly generated $70 million in the state” Officials have today been discussing the proposition of extending their contract to last until 2026, there had in the past been reluctance to move the festival dates because Sundance marks the beginning of the major film festival calendar.
