Hello, Boulder! After months of speculation, worry, and wonder, the Sundance Film Festival has today announced its new host city, starting in 2027. After one more year in Park City, Utah, the festival will decamp further east, picking up stakes for Boulder, Colorado. So, what’s that going to look like?

As the festival bandied about its possible new homes, ultimately drilling down on three finalists, IndieWire dug into the pros and cons of each city (including Salt Lake City, Utah and Cincinnati, Ohio). The result? We have a pretty good handle on what the 2027 edition of the festival will look like in its brand new home.

One thing that might have set Boulder apart from the crowd? Its small-town feel (something that has been missing from Park City in recent years), combined with a vibrant arts scene, a young community (including lots of college students from University of Colorado Boulder), and the kind of natural beauty that has proven inseparable from the overall Sundance brand.

All that, and room to grow.

It’s also something that Sundance has long ceased to be: actually walkable. In Boulder, Sundance will orient itself around downtown and the pedestrian-only Pearl Street (a four-block pedestrian mall that spans from 11th to 15th Street), which will offer access to restaurants, cafes, vintage theaters, performance arts spaces, a multiplex, university facilities, and other auditoriums.

One major fan of Pearl Street already? Sundance Institute CEO Amanda Kelso, who was thrilled about the central location and chatted it up in an interview with IndieWire this morning, live from Boulder. “One of the things that I really love is Pearl Street, which is a pedestrian mall,” she said. “The last time I was here, there was someone just walking down the street dressed like a pirate. It wasn’t Halloween! It’s got this fun, eclectic vibe to it. I love my cafes, and there’s 52 coffee shops here, one for each week of the year. It is a college town, so it does have a place where you can go get a late night slice of pizza, but there’s also some really fun, fancy Michelin restaurants as well.”

Right off Pearl Street? The century-old, 850-seat Boulder Theater. A mile and a half away, there’s the 16-screen Cinemark Century Boulder, offering four times as many screens as Park City’s annual venue Holiday Village, which is itself about the same distance from Park City’s Main Street corridor.

Other Boulder venues include the beloved and beautiful Macky Auditorium, a concert hall that seats more than 2,000 and could become the city’s version of the Eccles for big-ticket premieres. In an interview with IndieWire this morning, Sundance Film Festival Director and Head of Public Programming Eugene Hernandez was particularly thrilled about the theaters on offer.

“For me, it’s the movie theaters,” Hernandez said. “The Macky, this beautiful auditorium, an iconic building, I can’t wait to show movies there and to have that as a premier venue for our festival. So many of the cool art spaces that we’ve been able able to explore here in Boulder have been really exciting for us. The Boulder Theater, which is a great music venue, is also a great movie venue. There’s a great festival scene in Boulder and in Colorado, and that richness of the film scene, the art scene, the festival scene, that’s really exciting for us.”

Hernandez also spoke highly of the Dairy Arts Center, a 20-minute walk from Pearl Street (which hosts many of Boulder’s hotels) which seats 500. There are also various screening spaces at CU Boulder, which also plays home to its own robust film program, filling that need for young blood at the festival.

For anyone missing the natural beauty of Utah, Colorado should scratch a pretty nice itch. Ebs Burnough, Sundance Institute Board Chair, joined Hernandez and Kelso for this morning’s interview. As we chatted, the trio could look right outside their hotel’s windows to see the spread of the festival’s new home.

“I personally don’t always get to spend that much time really in the mountains. And so for me, it’s the nature, I’m looking out of the window right now at it!,” Burnough said. “It’s this expanse, this big sky, and these beautiful mountains. That kind of energy feeds the soul. Being here, even right now, I feel fed. And I think that’s a really exciting thing, especially being a person who lives predominantly in a city, it’s nourishing.”

From a more practical perspective, Boulder should offer some real ease for time- and cash-strapped Sundance attendees. The city offers a share of both luxury and economy hotel options, including the Limelight Boulder hotel, which is opening this August, with 252 guest rooms and 26,000 feet of event space — including a first-for-downtown-Boulder conference center that could host festival panels. The Moxy Boulder, located near the Macky Auditorium, also opened in 2024. The downtown St. Julien Hotel & Spa brings a luxury option.

Boulder is about a 45-minute drive from Denver International Airport, the third-largest international airport in the United States. That’s on par with the current drive from Salt Lake City’s airport to Park City. The Denver airport services nonstop flights from Los Angeles and New York and is a hub for international flights coming into and out of the United States.

For now, however, the trio are mostly excited to get people to Boulder to see for themselves. “We’ll see you in 2027 at the Sundance Film Festival. 2027 in Boulder,” Burnough said. “It’s so much more exciting to be excited about things and it’s also so much more exciting to actually show up and and take in something new and be engaged with it. Isn’t it great to be surprised sometimes?”

You can read more about the other two finalists who were in the mix to play home to Sundance right here. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the final edition to take place in Park City, Utah, will unfold January 22 – February 1, 2026.

Additional reporting by Ryan Lattanzio and Brian Welk.