In film festivals, The 2020 Cannes Film Festival, originally scheduled to occur in mid-May, was postponed and later cancelled from "its original form", and its venue converted to an emergency homeless shelter for the period of the national lockdown in France. By contrast the 77th Venice International Film Festival, scheduled for early September, declared in April that it would still take place as originally planned and would not be collaborating with Cannes. Eligibility rules for the 93rd Academy Awards were changed due to the pandemic, with films that debuted on streaming services being eligible for the first time. At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, held as originally schedules in January in Utah, US, many attendees fell ill with flu-like symptoms. It was dubbed the "Sundance Plague" and later was presumed to be one of the first mass transmission events of COVID-19 in the United States, more than a month before the global pandemic was declared.