Sundance Festival: more bombs than blockbusters?

BEIJING, Jan. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- The Sundance Film Festival's opening weekend, often the setting for rapturous audience reactions and frenzied all-night bidding wars, drew to a close looking more and more like a disappointment, if not an outright failure.

Over and over again films played to auditoriums packed with acquisition executives, who then could be seen sneaking out one by one. Over and over again rumors of deals proved false.

That could change, of course, and film agents said that as recently as last year the first big sale ¢w of "Grace Is Gone," to the Weinstein Company for 4 million U.S. dollars ¢w didn't take place until Sunday night. But the dismal box office performance of Sundance films like that one (it earned less than 37,000 dollars) may be a reason this year's festival marketplace started off so slowly.

"A lot of people got burned last year," said Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. "You never lose money on a movie you don't buy."

Some films seem likely to find buyers eventually, if not as quickly or at prices as high as their producers might have hoped. At midday on Sunday agents were still weighing offers for, among others, "Sunshine Cleaning," a drama about sisters struggling to make ends meet, starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt; "The Wackness," a coming-of-age tale about a high school drug dealer, starring Josh Peck and Ben Kingsley; and "What Just Happened?" Barry Levinson's movie-industry satire starring Robert De Niro.

By Sunday afternoon the biggest acquisition announced was HBO's purchase of domestic rights to the documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Marina Zenovich's re-examination of the sex-with-a-minor case that led to the filmmaker's flight from the United States to avoid jail. The Weinstein Company took overseas distribution rights for a low-six-figure sum, and all told the sellers received less than 2 million dollars, people involved in the deal-making said.

HBO's documentary unit also bought "The Black List: Volume One," a collection of interviews by Elvis Mitchell, a former film critic for The New York Times, of high-profile African-Americans, including Sean Combs, Bill T. Jones, Vernon Jordan Jr. and Chris Rock.

(Agencies)