A look at the Sundance Film Festival's foray into the metaverse, which included Q&As with filmmakers' avatars, networking parties, and “virtual cinemas”
Sundance offered a metaverse version this year. Here's what it was like to attend it. Tweets: @aweiss Tweets: Aaron Weiss / @aweiss : Dear lord this looks awful. Let's take all the worst parts of the moviegoing experience and re-create them at home! All that's missing is a Web3 douchebag minting NFTs of sticky theater floors. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Sundance's metaverse edition is the third act of a long experiment: the festival put VR at the center of its 2015 experimental showcase, then built an extensive VR platform for the fully virtual 2021 edition. The 2022 version extends that platform into a persistent venue — avatar Q&As, networking parties, virtual cinemas — rather than a one-year pandemic workaround.
The reception, though, is souring in parallel with the broader scene: Aaron Weiss's mockery of recreating 'the worst parts of the moviegoing experience' at home lands weeks before SXSW's crypto-and-metaverse programming draws the same verdict of underwhelming, mundane, and pathetic from VICE.
First-order effects
- Attendees get a headset-optional metaverse venue replacing Park City foot traffic, while filmmakers' avatars front the Q&As — and vocal attendees like Weiss frame the result as a downgrade from both physical festivals and plain streaming.
Second-order effects
- Rival festivals watching Sundance now have a cautionary data point alongside SXSW's metaverse showing, pressuring them to justify virtual venues by what they enable — global access, archival screenings — rather than novelty.
- Exhibitors like Cinemark and AMC, which have been testing high-end multiplayer VR inside actual theaters, can position physical venues as the place where immersion works, against at-home metaverse attendance that critics find flat.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across Sundance and SXSW, metaverse editions settle into being marketing experiments attached to physical festivals rather than replacements — and the festivals that keep investing will be those treating virtual access as an equity-of-access play, not a headline feature.
The trend: Cultural festivals are outpacing audience appetite for metaverse editions, turning 2022's string of poorly received virtual venues into the stress test that decides whether they persist as complements to physical events.