The ultimate Sundance Movie Competition in its dwelling of over 40 years, Park Metropolis, Utah, can be lacking a key venue from the pageant’s storied historical past: The Egyptian Theatre on Major Avenue won’t return for the 2026 version earlier than Sundance strikes to Boulder, Colorado, beginning in 2027.
The theater, opened on Christmas Day 1926, has served as a dwell performing arts area along with serving as a cinema. It was conspicuously not noted of the “What to Know Concerning the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition” letter written by the director of the Sundance Movie Competition and Public Programming, Eugene Hernandez, that press obtained July 14.
The Egyptian Theatre’s government director Randy Barton instructed Park Metropolis’s native NPR affiliate KPCW that the venue was certainly sitting out the ultimate Sundance altogether and is “not arrange for movie” in any respect. It will likely be solely a live-performance area going ahead.
A supply from Sundance tells IndieWire, although, that there’s a want to discover a second within the ultimate Park Metropolis pageant to acknowledge the shared historical past and legacy that the pageant has with the Egyptian, though it is going to certainly not be a venue this time round.
That second of acknowledgment can be effectively value it: The Egyptian is the place so many iconic moments in Sundance historical past have taken place. As longtime dwelling of the Midnight part, it’s the place “The Blair Witch Mission” and “Hereditary” premiered. To not point out many others, together with Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac,” which had a secret screening there at Sundance prematurely of its official premiere at Berlin. Earlier than the Eccles Theater opened on the Park Metropolis Excessive Faculty, the Egyptian was the pageant’s showcase theater.
In higher information, nonetheless, the Yarrow Theatre can be returning now that Slamdance has left Park Metropolis for Los Angeles. The Sundance rival took over the theater, positioned within the Yarrow Doubletree lodge on Park Avenue, for the 2024 version of the pageant, and it sat empty in 2025, regardless of Sundance shifting its pageant headquarters and press badge pickup there this 12 months. (The pageant headquarters will return to the Sheraton, additional away, in 2026, nonetheless.) The final time the Yarrow Theatre was a part of Sundance was in 2023 when it operated underneath the identify “The Park Avenue Screening Room” and premiered movies resembling Doug Liman’s nonetheless unreleased Brett Kavanaugh documentary, “Justice.”
Additionally, regardless of being completely closed the remainder of the 12 months — as indicated by Google, its elimination from proprietor Metropolitan Theatres’ web site, and the reporting of an IndieWire supply who was lately on the bottom in Park Metropolis — the Vacation Village Cinemas will reopen underneath a particular association only for Sundance 2026, because it additionally did in 2025.
Different screening venues for Sundance 2026 would be the Eccles Theatre, Library Middle Theatre, The Ray Theatre, and Redstone Cinemas.
