Boulder is a city that truly loves its silver screens.
I’m a half-hour walk from a very popular movie theater, located in a sprawling and upscale urban shopping center featuring Anthropologie, Apple, Lululemon, and dozens more stores and restaurants.
The theater is the Cinemark Century Boulder, featuring sixteen screens with stadium seating and high-fidelity sound systems, and a full bar around the corner from where they sell popcorn, Baby Ruths, and Coke.
On Sunday, I walked the walk and saw “Coyote vs Acme,” a new and very satisfying coyote-roadrunner treatment that revisits all the slapstick humor of the original 1960s cartoon series when the coyote’s outlandish attempts to catch the speeding bird hilariously backfire, often in an explosion. (“Meep meep.”)
My walk was complicated in both directions by sidewalks at intersections that had been dug up and blocked off by orange cones, making it harder to cross the streets.
Chet, an Uber driver I rode with on Monday, shared with me his theory of what is causing the sudden crush of road and sidewalk work: preparing the city for a special honor.
In 2027, Boulder will become the brand new host city for the world-famous Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the U.S. It was established in 1978, under a different name, by the Sundance Institute, founded by Robert Redford.
“They want the city to look its best,” said Chet.
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Boulder is already home to the Boedecker Theater, located in the Dairy Arts Center on Walnut Street. The art-film theater offers around 700 screenings each year. And The Boulder International Film Festival, launched by the Colorado Film Society, has been held every year since 2005, at the Boedecker and elsewhere.
This past April, festival organizers offered what they called “the year’s most thrilling adventure films — from climbing and highlining to mountain biking and ski mountaineering,” all typical of the Colorado active, outdoors way of life.
The Boulder International festival drew about 25,000 viewers this past April to more than 80 screenings.
The Boedecker is also home is to numerous cinema series and other smaller festivals, including Classics with Jeffrey Kash, Friday Night Weird, How to Watch a Movie, the Boulder Jewish Film Festival, Boulder Environmental/Nature/Outdoors Film Festival, and Mimesis Film Festival.
The Sundance festival will run for eleven days in January 2027, with Boulder taking over for Park City, Utah, where it was previously held. Films will be screened at several locations, including on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.
The Colorado event will feature about six days of previews plus competition categories to fill out the run.
In 2025, about 85,000 viewers attended Sundance in person in Utah, and tens of thousands more watched films that were streamed.
If that’s the outdoor mall, I worked at a sub shop in 1979 there. I kept a houseful of hippies (myself included) well fed on pretty good subs. I look back on the extent of my thievery with a healthy amount of regret.
Yes, that’s the place. Funny story. (I think the rules were different in 1979.)