Orlando Film Festival canceled for 2025
Fest plans online awards and rebooted event next year
Exclusive to MeierMovies, November 13, 2025
The Orlando Film Festival will not take place this year, according to executive director Dan Springen.
“There won’t be a physical festival this year,” Springen says. “But there will be an awards ceremony, potentially online … and screenings next year.”
The festival, the largest in Florida when judged by the number of films, was originally scheduled for the first week of November but kept pushing back its dates because it couldn’t find a venue, after the closure of its longtime home, the downtown CMX Cinemas Plaza Café 12 (formerly the Cobb Plaza).
“The theater pulled the rug out from under me,” Springen says, adding that he’s been unable to locate a replacement. Until recently, however, he says he was still hopeful that the cinema would reopen or he could find another home by November or December. But with the clock ticking down on 2025 and the festival still “in a holding pattern,” he says he realized he had to make the decision to forego a physical event this year. But he does hope to show many of the accepted films at the festival in 2026, which he plans to hold once he secures a venue.
What about submission fees, which filmmakers paid on the promise of a physical festival in 2025?
“There’s no way the fees can go back to everybody,” Springen says, adding that the films will be shown at some time in the future. “Twenty years of holding a festival, I’m not going to let filmmakers down. The city let me down.”
Springen says he plans to notify the roughly 250 accepted filmmakers of their acceptance by November 21 and honor those films with the aforementioned online awards ceremony later this year and/or by screening the films in 2026.
Despite the setback, Springen says he is enthusiastic about a 2026 festival, saying he would prefer to keep it in downtown Orlando but might explore other options, such as Epic Theatres at Lee Visita, near the Orlando International Airport.
As for the future of the old venue, that’s anyone’s guess. There have even been rumors that a celebrity might swoop in and buy the property, keeping some of the screens while turning the rest of the space into a different type of entertainment destination. But the space’s cinematic future currently looks bleak, especially after several screens were vandalized earlier this year, according to Springen.
“[The building owners] haven’t sold the theater,” Springen says, though CMX, which leased the cinema, is no longer in the picture. “But we don’t know if it’s going to be a theater” in the future.
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Update
Though the 2025 festival will not take place, notifications still went out to filmmakers via Film Freeway on November 21. The acceptance e-mails said, “Congratulations on being selected for our 20th year of the Orlando Film Festival. Our theater downtown is currently in negotiations for the next owner and is closed. We will be announcing winners before Christmas and playing them next year for OFF 2026.”
As of November 22, Film Freeway still listed the 2025 dates as December 18-21.