Which movies sold big at this year’s Sun­dance Film Festival?

As the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val starts to wind down for anoth­er year, the dust on a feed­ing fren­zy has begun to set­tle in Park City. The press may be in town on pure­ly crit­i­cal grounds, but the indus­try types have come to Utah with check­books in hand, keen to snatch up the year’s next big sleep­er hit.

The biggest-tick­et buy of the fes­ti­val comes from the folks at Neon, cur­rent­ly rid­ing high on the over­lap between the waves of praise for Par­a­site and the waves of antic­i­pa­tion for Por­trait of a Lady on Fire.

They plunked down a $17.5 mil­lion chunk of change for Palm Springs, a Ground­hog Day riff pro­duced by the Lone­ly Island boys, in which Andy Sam­berg and Cristin Mil­i­oti get trapped in a time-loop togeth­er. (The exact price tag includ­ed an addi­tion­al six­ty-nine cents, pre­sum­ably so that they could break the record pre­vi­ous­ly set with the pur­chase of Birth of a Nation, and cue up thou­sands of jokes involv­ing the word ​“nice.”)

The oth­er head­line-grab­bing acqui­si­tion came from Disney’s recent­ly de-Foxed stu­dio branch Search­light Pic­tures, which ponied up a hefty $12 mil­lion for The Night­house. The film joins Rebec­ca Hall as a wid­ow grad­u­al­ly dis­cov­er­ing the dark secrets her deceased hus­band left behind, and Dis­ney knows full well that no genre trans­lates small bud­gets to big box-office returns as reli­ably as horror.

After sling­ing the most cash dur­ing last year’s fes­ti­val (and tak­ing seri­ous fis­cal hits on releas­es like Late Night and Brit­tany Runs a Marathon), Ama­zon returned unde­terred. They dou­bled up with deals for Her­self, in which a sin­gle moth­er con­quers her own home­less­ness by build­ing a new one from scratch, as well as Uncle Frank, Alan Ball’s peri­od piece about an old­er gay man con­tend­ing with the death of his broth­er. (Ball’s film also drew a steep $12 mil­lion sum.)

Sony Pic­tures Clas­sics was even busier, snatch­ing up three of the some­what low­er-pro­file titles. The first was The Father, a char­ac­ter piece in which Antho­ny Hop­kins por­trays a man slow­ly suc­cumb­ing to demen­tia. Then came doc­u­men­tary The Truf­fle Hunters, a peek into the clan­des­tine world of Italy’s most pres­ti­gious white truf­fle har­vesters. Last up was I Car­ry You With Me, a dra­ma revolv­ing around an aspir­ing Mex­i­can chef who cross­es the bor­der in pur­suit of success.

In the wild world of stream­ing, the com­mo­tion was no less hec­tic. Net­flix came to the fes­ti­val with a sta­ble of films already secured – the Tay­lor Swift doc­u­men­tary Miss Amer­i­cana, Dee Rees‘ new fea­ture The Last Thing He Want­ed, to name only a cou­ple – and plucked two more from the line­up. The Wal­ter Mer­ca­do bio-doc Mucho Mucho Amor and the time­ly refugee thriller His House will both appear online lat­er this year

Mean­while, Apple had their own gam­bit to attend to. They teamed with A24 to come up with the $12 mil­lion that got them the rights to Boys State, the most high-cost doc­u­men­tary buy in the festival’s his­to­ry. The film tracks a dar­ing social exper­i­ment in which one thou­sand 17-year-old boys from across Texas formed an inde­pen­dent colony with its own gov­ern­ment – the think pieces write themselves.

A few major titles remain to-be-claimed (look­ing at you, Miran­da July​‘s Kajil­lion­aire), but the avalanche of deals at this year’s Sun­dance promise a live­ly movie cal­en­dar for the rest of 2020. Expect to see these titles fill­ing out the dog days of sum­mer, the anti­dote to block­buster pro­gram­ming in July and August.