The final Sundance Film Festival in its home of over 40 years, Park City, Utah, will be missing a key venue from the festival’s storied history: The Egyptian Theatre on Main Street will not return for the 2026 edition before Sundance moves to Boulder, Colorado, starting in 2027.
The theater, opened on Christmas Day 1926, has served as a live performing arts space in addition to serving as a cinema. It was conspicuously left out of the “What to Know About the 2026 Sundance Film Festival” letter written by the director of the Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming, Eugene Hernandez, that press received July 14.
The Egyptian Theatre’s executive director Randy Barton told Park City’s local NPR affiliate KPCW that the venue was indeed sitting out the final Sundance altogether and is “no longer set up for film” at all. It will be exclusively a live-performance space going forward.
A source from Sundance tells IndieWire, though, that there is a desire to find a moment in the final Park City festival to acknowledge the shared history and legacy that the festival has with the Egyptian, even though it will indeed not be a venue this time around.
That moment of acknowledgment would be well worth it: The Egyptian is where so many iconic moments in Sundance history have taken place. As longtime home of the Midnight section, it’s where “The Blair Witch Project” and “Hereditary” premiered. Not to mention many others, including Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac,” which had a secret screening there at Sundance in advance of its official premiere at Berlin. Before the Eccles Theater opened at the Park City High School, the Egyptian was the festival’s showcase theater.
In better news, however, the Yarrow Theatre will be returning now that Slamdance has left Park City for Los Angeles. The Sundance rival took over the theater, located in the Yarrow Doubletree hotel on Park Avenue, for the 2024 edition of the festival, and it sat empty in 2025, despite Sundance moving its festival headquarters and press badge pickup there this year. (The festival headquarters will return to the Sheraton, further away, in 2026, however.) The last time the Yarrow Theatre was part of Sundance was in 2023 when it operated under the name “The Park Avenue Screening Room” and premiered films such as Doug Liman’s still unreleased Brett Kavanaugh documentary, “Justice.”
Also, despite being permanently closed the rest of the year — as indicated by Google, its removal from owner Metropolitan Theatres’ website, and the reporting of an IndieWire source who was recently on the ground in Park City — the Holiday Village Cinemas will reopen under a special arrangement just for Sundance 2026, as it also did in 2025.
Other screening venues for Sundance 2026 will be the Eccles Theatre, Library Center Theatre, The Ray Theatre, and Redstone Cinemas.
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