UPDATE: Sundance has canceled its Southern California drive-in screenings, according to Variety. Our original story appears below.
You won’t need to take a road trip to Utah this winter (which, you know, you probably shouldn’t have been planning right now anyway) to see Sundance’s slate of future hits. Instead, the film festival is bringing some of its only in-person screenings to Los Angeles.
The Sundance Institute announced on Wednesday that the 2021 edition of its signature fest will take place almost entirely online. From January 28 to February 3, the Sundance Film Festival will screen all of its 70-plus movies and their accompanying Q&As online, and it’s also partnering with arthouse cinemas and film organizations across the country for a series of locally-focused talks. It’s not leaving Park City entirely behind, though, as the fest will still program screenings at the Ray.
Most excitingly for Angelenos, Sundance said that it’ll host screenings at a pair of SoCal drive-ins: the Mission Tiki Drive In Theatre in Montclair and at the Rose Bowl, which has operated an occasional drive-in at its parking lot since the summer.
Screening details aren’t available quite yet, but you can expect to find out more when the full festival program is announced later this month. Tickets are expected to go on sale to the general public beginning January 7.
It’s not the first time L.A. has had a taste of Sundance. As recently as 2018, Sundance NEXT FEST, a smaller showcase of cutting-edge, bizarre and trendy films, spent a few days over the summer at Downtown’s Theatre at Ace Hotel. That fest first landed here in 2013 at the former Sundance Cinemas in West Hollywood (now a temporarily-shuttered AMC dine-in).
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