No CineVegas Film Festival in 2010

A sure sign of the troubled economic times, CineVeags has been canceled for 2010. I have spoken to other festival programmers about this very concern over the past year, year-and-a-half, and there's no question that regional festivals are feeling the sting, even if weekend box office revenues are still quite healthy. The CineVegas announcement came this Friday (via IndieWire), with Festival President Robin Greenspun saying in a statement, "Given the current economic climate and the pressures it has created, we made the difficult decision to put CineVegas on hiatus for the coming year.” “CineVegas has become such a well respected film festival, and rather than allow the economy to affect its level of quality we have opted to put the event on hold,” added Greensupn. Like so many festivals, CineVegas has events scheduled throughout the year, primarily advance film screenings. Those are scheduled to continue, so it's not as though CineVegas is disappearing, only taking a year off. It is a little surprising that what is perceived as one of the coolest movie destinations on the calendar has to resort to this sort of thing, but with the financial burden falling so heavily on generating sponsorship revenue, the expectations are difficult to manage. One year, you might have sponsors lined up to fork over money, but other years it could be a ghost town. In Las Vegas, there's no shortage of entertainment spectacles, which also attract a huge number of corporate underwriters, so perhaps with a shrunken pool of money, the best way to weather this storm really is to skip a year. We'll hope CineVegas can return in the summer of 2011 and beyond, and we'll keep you updated if something new should shake out in the next few months about its future.