At the Sundance Film Festival, which begins today, producers making the hard sell stand to ink record-breaking deals as a perfect storm of distributor glut, film shortage, and a writers' strike stirs up a potential buying spree.

Last year, studio heads took a bath as their $53 million investments for 20 Sundance films drew a historic low of $34 million for the 14 titles that made the screen: All signs pointed to a raging case of buyer's remorse. Even Sundance pasha Harvey Weinstein made a stir by driving up bids with an aggressive, highly publicized buying spree. His company bought Teeth, "a feminist horror comedy," which tested poorly and he later unloaded to Lionsgate. Weinstein also picked up Justin Theroux's Dedication, for a snappy $4 million, which got widely panned and grossed a paltry $93,000.

"It's a seller's world now," Sony Pictures Classic's Tom Bernard predicted last week. "It's not the movies, it's the hotbox of the selling. Sellers are whipping people into a frenzy. It's not an organized way of doing business. It's back-alley stuff. It's speed dating, then you get married."

Out of the reported 100 films for sale this year, quirky, slim-budget features and documentaries may spell box office poison. Early buzz centers on The Wackness, starring Ben Kingsley, American Son with Nick Cannon, and Sunshine Cleaning featuring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. So far, the award for most pre-fest buzz goes to Barry Levinson's Hollywood comedy What Just Happened, starring Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, and MILFy Katherine Keener. But then no matter the market, it's hard to imagine a cast of that caliber ever failing to reach its asking price.

Still, "It's speculative," Sundance director Geoff Gilmore tells Radar, in the most diplomatic terms. "But when you add up these things for the worse-case scenario it's conceivable that it's a seller's market. It's really dependent on the nature of the work. If they think it will play, they'll go after them." Any bets for this year? "I don't know," Gilmore says. "It's their ballbark. I just put the ball into play.