Talk of the demise of the Sundance Film Festival as an incubator for audience-friendly unbiased movies seems to have been drastically exaggerated.

When titles from this 12 months’s fortieth anniversary competition weren’t flying off the cabinets by the third day of screenings, some observers noticed it as yet one more signal that Hollywood was in dire straits. The competition was now not that includes unbiased movies that might go on to be commercially viable, the pondering went.

Yet when the competition concluded over the weekend, it appeared that studios had discovered numerous movies that they have been prepared to guess would join with moviegoers.

As has been the case lately, streaming companies made the flashiest offers. Netflix paid a reported $17 million for the horror movie “It’s What’s Inside” and Amazon/MGM purchased “My Old Ass,” starring Aubrey Plaza, for $15 million. “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” a documentary a few Russian couple who save their marriage by scaling skyscrapers, was acquired by Netflix, whereas Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the Max streaming service, is negotiating a $15 million sale for “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve story,” a documentary concerning the “fall and rise” of the actor greatest recognized for his big-screen portrayal of Superman.

In addition, Netflix is in unique negotiations for worldwide rights to the documentary “Will and Harper,” which tracks the highway journey taken by the longtime buddies Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, who transitioned to a lady on the age of 61.

The conventional studios received in on the act, too. Reminiscent of the headiest days of Sundance, an all-night bidding warfare ended with Searchlight Pictures’ buying Jesse Eisenberg’s movie “A Real Pain,” during which he stars reverse Kieran Culkin, for $10 million. The unbiased distributor Neon purchased Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story “Presence” for $5 million.

Deborah McIntosh, co-head of WME’s unbiased movie financing and gross sales group, mentioned this 12 months’s market was prone to find yourself on par with 2023 by way of gross sales quantity.

“I think that there’s really plenty of things coming out now that the festival dust is settling, where buyers feel really excited about the films they can make money on,” she mentioned in an interview. “Ultimately, the crop of movies is very strong, and I think the buying market has increased year on year and hopefully is settling back in a good spot.”

The Sundance Film Festival has lengthy been seen as a barometer for the well being of the movie business. In the previous 12 months, after two strikes that shut down the enterprise for shut to 6 months, movie insiders hoped {that a} sturdy market would emerge during which an intensive variety of films can be snapped up and ultimately made obtainable to the general public.

“My hope is that the one positive thing about the strike is that a lot of movies that might have struggled shouldn’t, because there are so many holes in the release schedule,” the producer Jason Blum mentioned throughout a news convention at first of the competition. “I hope a bunch of Sundance movies wind up in theaters quickly in the next six months.”

Still, all will not be idyllic within the unbiased movie market. Last week, Sundance convened a three-hour summit the place 60 business leaders from throughout the spectrum of indie movie — distributors, producers and gross sales brokers — gathered to brainstorm on the problems dealing with the enterprise. According to at least one attendee, who spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of the occasion was off limits to the media, one focus was on how greatest to assist up-and-coming unbiased filmmakers, who usually go on to land on the helm of a few of Hollywood’s greatest films. The main concern was that whereas movies at Sundance have been nonetheless being purchased for bigger sums, the smaller million-dollar purchases that used to symbolize the vast majority of gross sales are now not as considerable.

“We are well beyond the post-studio era and as it turns out, we are well beyond the post-streaming era,” mentioned Tom Quinn, chief govt of Neon, referencing the go-go days when first studios after which streaming companies usually overpaid for expertise and set excessively giant budgets for movies.

Yet, he added, regardless of the contraction out there, Sundance has remained regular.

“It’s really interesting to see the consistency of Sundance,” he mentioned, including that sure movies from this 12 months’s competition “could be put into Sundance 20 years ago and they would be as relevant then as they are today, a certain timeless notion of what independent filmmaking is, and that’s really exciting.”