The 2026 Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week in Park City, which is hosting it for the last time, and Adobe has been highlighting just how influential its tools are when it comes to this year's entrants.
Of course, you would pretty much expect Creative Cloud to feature in the majority of titles at any film festival. With 20+ key creative apps under its umbrella, it touches pretty much every aspect of the modern production workflow. All the same, the fact that the annual Sundance Institute survey reckons that 85% of 2026’s entrants used Adobe Creative Cloud applications — including Premiere, Frame.io, After Effects, Photoshop and the Substance 3D Collection — is an impressive figure.
Not to downplay that achievement, one of the things that is interesting to note this year is the sheer number of titles that have been cut on Adobe Premiere. These are always present, a matter often discussed at length at Adobe House on Park City's Main Street, but this year's crop seems to include more high-profile titles than ever
Chasing Summer, Wicker, The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, Union County, Zi, The Moment, and The Brittney Griner Story were all cut on Premiere this year, with several of the titles generating serious buzz in the run up to the festival.
We'll have a Sundance preview soon, as well as interviews with some of the editors working on these projects. But with the Oscar nominations due to be announced in a few days, and the BAFTAs to follow not long after, it's worth noting the number of big contenders this award season that were built on Premiere.
There's always been one or two. 2022 smash hit Everything Everywhere All at Once famously won Premiere Pro its first editing Oscar, along with a clutch of other Academy awards. And Anora last year was another noted success.
But this year it feels like Premiere is not so much about the outliers but has increasing amounts of industry momentum behind it, with the likes of Marty Supreme, Train Dreams (a Sundance 2025 alum), 2025 Palme D'Or Winner It Was Just an Accident, Kathryn Bigelow's Netflix hit A House of Dynamite, and a whole raft of documentary titles (The Perfect Neighbor, The Alabama Solution, Cutting Through Rocks, and Seeds) all in the running.
It's going to be interesting to see if it can convert all that buzz into nominations and then into awards. Stay tuned to RedShark and we'll let you know what happens.