“The roads of Sundance past are littered with the bodies of films that got overhyped. The hot film coming into Sundance is never the hot film going out of Sundance. And so if you have a film that you think can be successful, it may seem counterintuitive, but the best instinct there is to downplay it, to create the lowest expectations possible while getting all the necessary people in the theater.”

But that's a big part of it, that kind of transition.

…asked John to walk me through some of the biggest deals he's made in his 40 years at the festival and what he's learned. First, John told me you might think his job might be to talk up the movie he's selling as loudly as possible. But John Sloss there is a real danger in building up too much buzz.

John Sloss one of the best examples of this strategy came back in 2003. His company, Sonetic, came across a low-budget indie feature from a couple of first-time filmmakers ahead of the festival.

That was a film that sort of came in over the transom. It's like a $200,000 film that was made by a bunch of Mormon kids in Preston, Idaho. And we flipped out over it.

John and his colleagues signed the filmmakers onto their sales slate for the next Sundance, but he says they decided that the best strategy in this case would be to keep that information a secret. They were essentially betting that audiences would find it just as charming as they did, and that the…