First Sundance Deal Near As Neon Emerges From Bidding Battle Near Deal For ‘Together:’ The Dish​on January 29, 2025 at 2:01 pm

EXCLUSIVE: Neon has emerged from a days long bidding battle near a deal to acquire WW rights to Together, the Michael Shanks scripted and directed crowd pleaser that stars Dave Franco, Alison Brie and Damon Herriman.

The film premiered in the midnight section on January 26 at the Eccles Theater and WME Independent has been fielding the offers ever since. All the major buyers of indie fare were in the scrum.

The logline: With a move to the countryside already testing the limits of a couple’s relationship, a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh. 

The film is produced by Picturestart’s Erik Feig and Tango’s Lia Buman, along with Brie, Franco, Mike Cowan, and Andrew Mittman.

Despite the press decrying that Sundance is a failure — one insufferable attention-craving blowhard called it an “extinction event” — more deals will follow. And Sundance will be okay. Much of Hollywood just burned to the ground, and some industry and filmmakers came having just lost their homes. The distraction somewhat explains the sluggish sales pace, but there are good movies at Sundance that will find homes, if not on the hasty schedule that some journalists seem to require.

What is on the minds of many Sundance stalwarts is that the festival has outgrown Park City. They shut traffic on Main Street, but that only made it snarl everywhere else. Getting to the less than state of the art theaters to see premieres is harder than ever. I’m hearing that Boulder, Colorado is likely going to be where Sundance gets a rebirth. Reps from the city came dangling what I hear was a big tax credit rumored to be around $34M, and a plan to have a more centralized festival as is the case with Telluride, Toronto and Cannes. Stay tuned.