It is Monday, January 26th. We are at Sundance. Craig and I have made the rounds here in Park City. It's pretty effing cold. Thanks to everyone who's come up and said hello. Lots of townies here for the final Sundance in Utah. Special shout out to the two ladies at the HBO documentaries party last night who made me retake a selfie with them because I quote, looked bad the first time. Thank you for that. As for the movies, Eugene Hernandez was right last week on the show. I liked the Olivia Wilde movie, The Invite a lot, some others, not so much. Definitely a lot of nostalgia and the freezing air here. I hosted a great dinner with filmmakers and producers last night, and people just kind of went around the table

telling amazing stories from the festival, big deals and culture-changing movies and celebrities

doing dumb stuff. That dinner was off the record, but my co-host for that dinner is our guest

today. John Sloss is the consummate Sundance salesman and dealmaker. He sold hundreds and hundreds

of movies over the years, from

Little Miss Sunshine to precious and all the Richard Linklater films to a bunch of titles he's

selling at this year's festival, like chasing summer and docs like the oldest person in the world.

We're going to talk about the Sundance movie market, whether these streamers are still as

dominant and how much more they need to pay to lure films away from theatrical distributors. Why the all-night bidding war is mostly a relic of the past, although we

got an exception this year. Lots here to discuss. So today it's the state of the Sundance deal market

with the king of the Sundance deal. From the ringer and puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is the town.

All right, we are here with John Sloss, the founder and head of Cynetic Media,

partner at his namesake law firm and Sundance veteran.

Is it fair to say you're the king of Sundance?

You would probably say you're the king of Sundance. You would probably say you're the king of Sundance.

I would never say, I'll leave that to others. Okay. We are here in the very glamorous, the town

condo at the base of Park City Mountain. On a scale of 1 to 10, how dumpy is this?

You must be doing very well. Oh, stop. This is not, This is not that, this is like, you're okay with this?

This is an acceptable environment for you.

Yeah, because I get to leave it in 20 minutes.

No, it's fine.

We have been here for four days now.

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