The best of 2010

The 26th Sundance Film Festival concluded its 10-day run on Saturday night with the announcement of this year's award winners. Topping all American narrative films in competition was Grand Jury Prize winner Winter's Bone, a bleak drama about a teenage girl who searches for her missing, meth-dealing father in the Ozarks. The jury awarded its top U.S. documentary prize to Restrepo, a look at one year in the life of a platoon of American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.

Sundance attendees vote for another set of awards, and this year's top audience honors went to the romantic comedy happythankyoumoreplease, the directorial debut for "How I Met Your Mother" star Josh Radnor (who also wrote the film and appears in its ensemble cast). The audience award for top U.S. documentary went to Waiting for Superman, which aims to do for the American educational system what director Davis Guggenheim's earlier film An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming.

How did these award-winning films go over with audiences and critics, and which other films had Park City buzzing over the past two weeks? More on that in a moment, after a quick history lesson.

Charting the success of previous award winners

What does winning one of the festival's top awards actually mean for the future success of those films? Let's look at some recent Sundance winners, to see how they've performed once they reach theaters.

Grand Jury Prize (Dramatic) Winners

Year	Film	Metascore	Domestic Gross (in millions)
2010	Winter's Bone	??	??
2009	Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire	79	$45.2
2008	Frozen River	82	$2.5
2007	Sangre de Mi Sangre	56	$0.1 ($55k)
2006	Quinceañera	72	$1.7
2005	Forty Shades of Blue	74	$0.1 ($76k)
2004	Primer	68	$0.4
2003	American Splendor	90	$6.0
2002	Personal Velocity	70	$0.8
2001	The Believer	75	$0.4
2000	(tie) Girlfight	70	$1.6
	(tie) You Can Count on Me	85	$9.2

The Grand Jury Dramatic prize is awarded annually to the festival's top fiction film by a jury typically composed of filmmakers and actors. (This year's panel included actress Parker Posey and novelist Russell Banks.) As you can see above, the Grand Jury winners typically go on to receive strong reviews from critics when they are eventually released in theaters. Only one such winner (2007's Sangre de Mi Sangre) failed to receive positive reviews, and the winners from the past ten years achieved an average Metascore of 74.6.

Box office success is an entirely different story, however. Excluding last year's winner Precious, which is clearly an outlier in that its grosses far exceed those of the other films, Grand Jury Prize winners from the past decade averaged just $2.3 million at the box office. And half of the winners failed even to crack $1 million in grosses. So a stamp of approval from the Sundance jury appears to carry little weight with moviegoers.

Audience Award (Dramatic) Winners

Year	Film	Metascore	Domestic Gross (in millions)
2010	happythankyoumoreplease	??	??
2009	Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire	79	$45.2
2008	The Wackness	61	$2.1
2007	Grace Is Gone	65	$0.1 ($51k)
2006	Quinceañera	72	$1.7
2005	Hustle & Flow	68	$22.2
2004	Maria Full of Grace	87	$6.5
2003	The Station Agent	81	$5.7
2002	Real Women Have Curves	71	$5.9
2001	Hedwig and the Angry Inch	85	$3.1
2000	Two Family House	79	$1.0

Not surprisingly, Sundance audience members did a better job than jury members of picking movies that actual moviegoers wanted to see. Again excluding Precious (one of two films in the past decade to win top honors from both the jury and audiences), the past decade's Audience Award winning films averaged $5.4 million at the box office -- over twice the average of the Grand Jury Prize-winning titles. And of the audience picks, only the John Cusack drama Grace Is Gone was a major box office failure.

What's somewhat surprising is that audience members matched the juries in selecting movies that critics wanted to see. The average Metascore for the above audience-selected films is 74.8, a fraction of a point higher than the Grand Jury Prize average score.

Documentary Winners

Year	Grand Jury Prize	Metascore		Audience Award	Metascore
2010	Restrepo	??		Waiting for Superman	??
2009	We Live in Public	69		The Cove	84
2008	Trouble the Water	83		Fuel (fka "Fields of Fuel")	50
2007	Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)	71		Hear and Now *	XX
2006	God Grew Tired of Us	72		God Grew Tired of Us	72
2005	Why We Fight	68		Murderball	87
2004	DiG!	76		Born into Brothels	78
2003	Capturing the Friedmans	90		My Flesh and Blood	78
2002	Daughter from Danang	77		Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony	78
2001	Southern Comfort	78		Dogtown and Z-Boys	76
2000	Long Night's Journey Into Day	85		Dark Days	73

* The HBO documentary Hear and Now did not receive a theatrical release.

For documentary films, both the juries (average Metascore = 76.9) and audiences (75.1) did a good job of selecting films that would go on to receive strong reviews from critics.

How last year's Sundance films fared

Does Sundance buzz translate into good reviews, or strong box office performance? Below, let's look at the films that made the best and worst impressions on film experts at last year's festival, to see how those films were eventually received by critics and moviegoers.

Sundance 2009's Best-Received Narrative Films*

Rank	Film	Metascore	Domestic Gross (in millions)
1	Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire	79	$45.2
2	Humpday	74	$0.4
2	Bronson	71	$0.1
4	In the Loop	83	$2.4
5	An Education	85	$8.7
6	Sin Nombre	77	$2.5
7	(500) Days of Summer	76	$32.4
8	You Won't Miss Me	XX	[no U.S. release]
8	Cold Souls	69	$0.9
10	The Girlfriend Experience	66	$0.7
10	The Maid	82	$0.5

* In this table as well and the one below, films are ranked based on IndieWIRE's survey of critics and bloggers attending the festival.

There are some recognizable names on the list above, starting with the two biggest box office successes, Precious and (500) Days of Summer -- but also including likely Oscar nominee An Education. While not every film drew raves from critics, all of the best-received Sundance movies did eventually go on to earn generally positive reviews or better.

However, while all but one of these buzz films were released theatrically during 2009, several failed to make any appreciable showing at the box office. For example, Humpday attracted quite a bit of attention at the festival thanks in no small part to its subject matter: two straight friends have sex with each other on camera on a dare. But that same subject matter may have kept audiences away from the R-rated comedy, which grossed just $400,000 during its theatrical run. Like Humpday, the artsy crime thriller Bronson was among the top three best-received films of the festival (according to industry website indieWIRE), but it, too, failed to translate that reception into domestic box office success, grossing a paltry $105,000 in U.S. theaters.

Sundance 2009's Worst-Received Films

Rank	Film	Metascore	Domestic Gross (in millions)
1	The Informers	20	$0.3
2	Once More with Feeling	XX	[no U.S. release]
3	Brief Interviews with Hideous Men	44	$0.0 ($34k)
4	Manure	XX	[no U.S. release]
4	The Greatest	XX	[coming April 2010]
4	Paper Heart	54	$1.3

The films that failed to impress the experts at Sundance also performed poorly with film critics and audiences when they were eventually released -- if they managed to secure distribution at all. Of these films, Charlyne Yi's pseudo-documentary Paper Heart was the best performer, although it divided critics much the same way it divided Sundance audiences. The fact that The Greatest appears on this list doesn't bode well for its upcoming spring theatrical release; despite a strong cast (Susan Sarandon, Pierce Brosnan, Carey Mulligan), the tearjerker was mostly dismissed as too melodramatic.

Sundance as film market

Many films enter the festival without theatrical distribution, and the buzz generated at Sundance can trigger a bidding war among would-be distributors. What happened to the films picked up at last year's Sundance? Here's how they fared:

Films Acquired for Distribution During Sundance 2009

Film	Metascore	Purchase Price	Domestic Gross
An Education	85	$3.0	$8.7
In the Loop	83	$1.0	$2.4
Tyson	83	unknown	$0.9
Burma VJ	82	unknown	$0.1 ($52k)
Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire	79	$5.5	$45.2
Humpday	74	$0.1 - $0.5	$0.4
Cold Souls	69	unknown	$0.9
The September Issue	69	unknown	$3.8
Moon	67	unknown	$5.0
Rudo y Cursi	67	unknown	$1.8
Black Dynamite	65	$2.0	$0.2
Art & Copy	62	unknown	n/a
Dead Snow	61	unknown	$0.0 ($47k)
Brothers at War	60	unknown	$0.2
Adam	56	$1.5	$2.3
The Answer Man (fka "Arlen Faber")	44	unknown	$0.0 ($27k)
Spread	43	$3.5	$0.3
Brooklyn's Finest	XX	$3.0	[coming March 2010]
The Winning Season	XX	$2.0	[not yet released]
Kimjongilia	XX	unknown	[not yet released]
The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle	XX	unknown	[not yet released]

Purchase price and domestic gross in millions. Purchase prices are approximate (based on a variety of news reports), and many distributors did not disclose the prices paid to acquire rights. Domestic gross figures are through January 30, 2010.

The totals: 21 films were picked up for U.S. distribution, and 17 have been released to date. The average Metascore for these films was just over 67, and only four of the films failed to receive mostly positive reviews from critics -- a fairly good success rate. The median domestic box office gross for the 17 released films was $900,000, which is certainly not a fairly good success rate.

You'll notice that we don't have purchase prices for many of the films, which is due to secrecy on the part of distributors. One reason so many companies withheld the details of their Sundance acquisitions stems from Focus Features' 2008 acquisition of the distribution rights to comedy Hamlet 2 54 for a whopping $10 million -- a decision that proved to be disastrous when the film ultimately grossed just under $5 million.

The film with the largest known purchase price in 2009 -- Precious -- also proved to be the highest-grossing of last year's Sundance films, and others, like An Education, seem to have been successful pick-ups. But there were a few poor acquisitions last year as well, including the Ashton Kutcher comedy Spread (which earned back just $250,000 of its $3.5 million purchase price) and the blaxploitation goof Black Dynamite (which grossed about $243,000 against its $2 million purchase price). If there's a lesson here, it's that Sundance acquisitions are a crap shoot -- and that comedies, perhaps, should be avoided.

Lionsgate, the distributor that acquired Precious in 2009, made another splash this year when it wrote a check for $3.2 million to secure North American rights to the well-received thriller Buried after a quick but intense bidding war. The most expensive film acquired this year was Lisa Cholodenko’s buzzy The Kids Are All Right, picked up by Focus Features for close to $5 million. In a market described as "energetic" by Variety, but lacking major bidding wars and high prices common in previous years, other reported acquisitions at the 2010 festival included Joel Schumacher’s Twelve (to Hannover House for $2 million), Michael Winterbottom's controversial drama The Killer Inside Me (to IFC Films for $1 - $1.5 million), the Ryan Gosling drama Blue Valentine (to The Weinstein Co. for just over $1 million), the tragicomedy Hesher (to Newmarket for about $1 million), and festival winner Winter's Bone (purchased by Roadside Attractions for under $1 million just prior to the award announcement).

How did critics and festival-goers react to these and the events other talked-about films? On the next page, we examine this year's biggest Sundance offerings in depth.