For the past two years I have done an assessment of the box office success of the previous year’s Sundance Film Festival lineup (check out my analysis of 2012 and 2011). The reason I have done this is because Sundance is still regarded as the kick-off of the indie film festival season and as a result gets significant media attention. However, with the rapidly increasing number of film festivals sprouting up after films premiering at Sundance became monster hits in the 1990s and early 2000s, I felt that Sundance’s position as the crown jewel of indie film festivals has been tarnished in recent years.
After three disappointing years of only one or two hits coming out of Sundance from 2010-2012, I wrote, “I think the 2013 lineup has the strongest potential for box office success in years — I’d say since 2004, which featured The Butterfly Effect (eventually grossing $57.5 million), Saw ($55 million), Napoleon Dynamite ($44.5 million) and other favorites like Garden State, The Motorcycle Diaries, Super Size Me and Maria Full of Grace.” I have to give myself a little credit because I was right about 2013 doing much better than the previous few years. The 2013 festival proved to be the most successful Sundance in quite some time, though it wasn’t at the level of 2004 or even 2006 (AKA the year of Little Miss Sunshine).
There were four features that premiered at Sundance 2013 films that eventually grossed more than $10 million in U.S. theaters: Don Jon ($24.5 million), The Way, Way Back ($21.5 million), Jobs ($16.1 million) and Fruitvale Station ($16.1 million). If worldwide box office is taken into account, Before Midnight ($8.1 million in the U.S.) also crosses that mark. On top of that, Sundance 2013 had an extremely impressive thirty-four movies that grossed between $50,000 and $7 million at U.S. theaters and a thirty-fifth, The Look of Love, that only grossed $16,119 in the U.S. but made $1.2 million worldwide.
These “little hits” include the Oscar nominated documentaries Cutie and the Boxer (grossed $170,449 in the U.S.), Dirty Wars ($371,245) and 20 Feet from Stardom ($4.8 million). What more, almost all of these hits — both big and little — were released on video-on-demand this year, which added to their grosses. Several of them, like In a World… and Blackfish, garnered significant coverage as VOD releases. VOD definitely became a major player during the 2012 festival, and 2013 has continued to add to the success of these films that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle.
However, despite those successes — and 2013 was a successful year for Sundance acquisitions any way you slice it — it still seems like the days of Sundance Film Festival acquisitions $40+ million at the domestic box office are over for the foreseeable future (the last one to gross over $40 million was 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite, though 2006’s The Illusionist came close). Obviously a low-budget indie grossing $10-30 million is a big success, but it does suggest that the market for indie film is getting increasingly fragmented by the glut of releases since there are fewer runaway indie hits.
With that in mind, what about the 2014 lineup? The documentaries 20,000 Days on Earth and The Battered Bastards of Baseball have already gotten strong buzz. Submarine director Richard Ayoade‘s latest, The Double, has definitely drawn interest with Jesse Eisenberg in a duel role, and Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, which was will filmed over the course of twelve years, is a must-see. God’s Pocket has a very recognizable cast, and Whiplash began as a script on the black list and a short that premiered at last year’s Sundance Festival (Sony just acquired the international rights). Magnolia and Paramount have already teamed up to acquire Happy Christmas, directed by Joe Swanberg, so we’re already seeing deals made. However, unlike previous years it’s difficult to point at a few films that look like successes right out of the gate. So I’m guessing that 2014 will be the year in which a lot of these movies end up on VOD or another distribution model as their primary release method because I just don’t see a breakthrough hit yet based on what I’ve heard. But I think there’s at least one film (and as a Linklater fan, I’m thinking Boyhood) that will prove me wrong.
But that’s my assessment, and I’ll be back here in a year to evaluate how I did. Let us know in the comments below what you think about the Sundance 2014 lineup and what you think might succeed over this year.
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