Oscar-Nominated VFX Studio Comes to Longmont Ahead of Boulder’s First Sundance Festival
A little piece of Hollywood is coming to Longmont. Wylie Co. Visual Effects, the acclaimed Oscar-winning studio whose portfolio includes visually stunning blockbusters like Dune (2021) and Project Hail Mary (2026), has purchased a facility on South Bowen Street to serve as its new Colorado home base.
While Longmont has long been home to major tech companies, the move signals a major shift for the city as Boulder County prepares to step onto the global film stage with the upcoming arrival of the Sundance Film Festival, slated for 2027.
A New Creative Hub in Longmont
Wylie Co. is known for creating some of the world’s most technically ambitious cinematic imagery, and their approach is built on high-performance computing, machine learning, and AI initiatives that require a location capable of accommodating those needs. Longmont’s industrial corridors offer the perfect blend of essential infrastructure and easy access to both Boulder and Denver.
“We were looking for a place where we could build the next version of Wylie Co. VFX,” said Jake Maymudes, Founder and CEO of Wylie Co. Visual Effects.
For a company that relies heavily on immense computing power, the decision to plant roots in Longmont was strategic. “Longmont gives us the space, power and connectivity to centralize our workstations, servers and production infrastructure while building a creative home base in Colorado,” Maymudes added.
The 5,498 square foot property located on South Bowen Street provides a unique mix of office and industrial space. This layout allows the studio to comfortably house its heavy technology infrastructure and server operations today, while reserving significant space for future film production and data processing growth.
The Sundance Effect in Boulder County
For the average resident, a Hollywood VFX studio moving to town might seem out of the blue, but it is part of a larger cultural and economic wave hitting the region. In 2027, the world-renowned Sundance Film Festival is set to make its highly anticipated Boulder debut.
Historically based in Utah, Sundance is the premier independent film festival in the United States. Its expansion to Boulder is expected to bring an influx of global filmmakers, production companies, tourists, and industry executives to the Front Range. Neighboring communities like Longmont are ideally positioned to capture the spillover economic benefits, providing much-needed operational, production, and creative space for a rapidly growing local film industry.
“With Boulder’s growing film community and Sundance arriving in 2027, it feels like a particularly exciting time to be putting down roots here,” Maymudes noted.
This sentiment is echoed by local commercial experts familiar with Longmont’s business landscape. “More companies are seeking flexible spaces that bring office, production, and creative functions together under one roof,” says Adam Mesinger of Boulder-based Market Real Estate.
“With the Sundance Film Festival coming to Boulder and Colorado continuing to attract more film and television production, Longmont is well positioned to support that growth and further strengthen the state’s diverse economy”.
About Wylie Co. Visual Effects
Founded in 2015, Wylie Co. Visual Effects is an award-winning studio specializing in feature films and episodic television content. The studio’s work combines human artistry with complex digital production infrastructure to push the boundaries of modern filmmaking, handling everything from compositing and CG to character animation, lighting, and pre- and post-visualization.
While Wylie Co. will maintain its powerful servers and technology in Longmont, its creative workforce is distributed to capture top-tier talent. “We employ 100 of the world’s leading digital artists across North America; our artists can work from virtually anywhere, but the technology behind that work still needs a home,” explained Maymudes.
Originally founded in Venice, California, before expanding to a Culver City headquarters and a Montreal office, the studio was built on Maymudes’s extensive background as a VFX supervisor at industry titans like Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). Under his leadership, Wylie Co. has built a reputation as a full-service operation capable of handling everything from intricate pre-visualization to the final polish of photoreal environments and massive simulations.
A defining factor in Wylie Co.’s ongoing success is its agility in navigating industry disruptions, particularly by leaning into the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning within traditional visual effects workflows. By actively leveraging these emerging technologies to streamline rendering and post-production, the studio stays at the forefront of the field – which is exactly why the heavy power and infrastructure capabilities of their new Longmont facility are so vital.
It is this unique blend of distributed artistic talent and localized, cutting-edge digital infrastructure that has made Wylie Co. a trusted partner for some of Hollywood’s most ambitious filmmakers. Over the past decade, their specialized work has brought numerous high-profile worlds to life across a wide variety of genres, contributing to major box office hits and critically acclaimed television series.
Notable Wylie Co. Projects:
- Dune: Part One (2021)
- Dune: Part Two (2024)
- Dune: Part Three (2026)
- Project Hail Mary (2026)
- Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
- The Marvels (2023)
- The Killer (2023)
- Extraction 2 (2023)
- Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
- The Last of Us (2023)
- Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
As Longmont transitions into a destination for specialized, production-driven businesses, Wylie Co.’s arrival stands as a major milestone for the city’s evolving creative identity.
