The popular alternative pt. 1

This is part one of a two-part series by Nicholas Russell on the state of A24. This article is for current Dirt subscribers only, if you upgrade now we will send you today’s post in full.

Early last year, Bloomberg reported on a failed partnership between A24 and the NFL. If selected, A24 would have produced films and other tie-in content sanctioned by the league. On the idea behind the bid, Ravi Nandan, A24’s head of TV and nonfiction, said, “For us, it was like how do you take this thing that’s so well established and so Americana and have an A24 look and vibe?” The NFL eventually partnered with Skydance Media, whose sports arm has produced several documentaries and Ben Affleck’s Nike biopic Air. The potential collaboration offers a telling glimpse into A24’s trajectory over the last decade and change, marketing themselves as a dynamic entertainment company capable of putting the A24 filter on anything.

The distribution company-turned-studio has managed to walk a fine line between shrewd, tongue-in-cheek promotion of its own projects and an artist-forward ethos that gives smaller films and little-known directors a far-reaching, spotlit platform. Fans interpret A24 as a champion of cinema that believes in the mass appeal of challenging projects. Detractors see a zeitgeist-chasing machine that hawks products rather than art. Meanwhile, everyone seems to be chasing what A24 has become synonymous with: brand loyalty. Just recently, an article in The Cut on Simon & Schuster’s new publisher, Sean Manning, described his aspirations as becoming the “A24 of books.” The unspoken implication: A24 stands for a slick, adult-oriented something, not just movies or TV shows but podcasts, literature, merch, and design principles. A24 is a world. 

In the 90s, Dreamworks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg lodged a familiar complaint to the New York Times that “commerce has overwhelmed art, which is why Hollywood movies aren’t as good as they used to be.” Hollywood’s current risk-averse landscape makes an entity like A24, which produces sophisticated work less often than it produces the appearance of sophistication, stand apart. But there has always been tension between A24 the studio and A24 the startup. The company’s clear desire for growth, and its methods of doing so, reflect the latter more than the former. 

Near the end of his memoir Making Movies, Sidney Lumet, director of 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network, wrote, “Commercial success has no relationship to a good or bad picture. Good pictures become hits. Good pictures become flops. Bad pictures make money, bad pictures lose money. The fact is that no one really knows.” One hears this sentiment repeated across generations of Hollywood insiders. The difference now, beyond the fact that the demand for volume is so much higher and the quality of material so much lower, is that this frenzied search for what will be successful relies on hazy ideas a studio head, or a prominent shareholder, deems profitable. 

For A24, the latest, predictable intervention comes from private equity. 

As Daniel Bessner detailed in a piece for Harper’s, the “new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private equity firms” have been ruthlessly mining Hollywood for profit at the expense of any “vested interest in ‘the business’—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital.” In October 2022, KKR, a firm that manages over $500 billion in assets, invested $400 million in Skydance. That same year, Apollo, which manages a similarly-sized portfolio, invested $760 million into Legendary Pictures, mining the Dune franchise for all it’s worth. Silver Lake ($100+ billion) invested $500 million to double the size of one of Georgia’s largest production facilities. 

Meanwhile, in 2022, Stripes LLC (~$7 billion) led a $225 million equity investment in A24. “North of 60% of the people that go to see an A24 movie in a theater go because it’s an A24 film,” Stripes founder Ken Fox told Bloomberg, invoking the myth of that all-consuming A24 fan who loves Everything Everywhere All At Once or Lady Bird as much as Waves or White Noise. “They’ve watched A24 content, and they know that the quality is going to be exceptional and interesting and compelling. Basically, A24 and Disney are the only two companies that test that way.” At the end of June 2024, Thrive Capital, a major investor in OpenAI, along with other investing parties, participated in another round of funding to the tune of $100 million and a $3.5 billion valuation. Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner will sit on A24’s board. 

Often, there’s a repetitive nature to the language writers use when taking A24’s temperature. Scan a range of publications and a sentiment of obsession echoes, often with an emphasis on the company’s ascendant trajectory. “A24 finds the zeitgeist and sets the trend” says The Guardian. An Economist article titled “The rise and rise of A24, a champion of storytelling on screen” goes on to emphasize A24’s “idiosyncrasy” as a tastemaker. Meanwhile, over at the tech blog The Generalist, A24, still rising, is better seen as a “cultural conglomerate.” 

What is being entertained here is the degree to which a studio can serve as a litmus test for where modern filmmaking is headed. A24 has become both a very telling kind of punching bag, absorbing any number of wider systemic issues and anxieties, and a hero single-handedly rescuing cinema from a swift death. The cavalier flattening of major studio filmmaking, exemplified by the endless resurrection of nostalgia-bait IP and corporate overreach, makes it easy to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any studio’s artistic intentions (or if the question of making art enters the equation at all). A24 is pointed to as the singular way forward, but the company always wanted to assimilate into the mainstream, just by a less conventional approach. 

The early years of A24, when the company was making its way through film festivals in search of interesting, underappreciated acquisitions, has the ring of myth to it now. In 2012, David Fenkel, Daniel Katz, and John Hodges, all movie industry vets with experience in distribution at independent studios like Oscilloscope and finance groups like Guggenheim Partners, wanted to start their own company. The name came from the Italian highway Katz was driving on when he thought it was time to pull the trigger. 

The scrappy, distribution-only era of A24, which included Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, Trey Edward Shult’s Krisha, and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, preceded any of the films that cemented their much-debated aesthetic. The development of a cohesive brand identity, which papers over the many thematic and visual distinctions of their acquisitions, is easily applied to those touchstone films like The Witch or Ex Machina that the company had no hand in producing. A GQ story from 2017 serves as a microcosm of A24’s favored form of PR: styled in an oral history format, the piece walks through A24’s inception in 2012 and the company’s eventual industry success, culminating with Moonlight’s Best Picture Academy Award. Director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), actors James Franco (Spring Breakers) and Daniel Radcliffe (Swiss Army Man), along with Sofia Coppola (The Bling Ring) and Robert Eggers (The Witch) all make appearances but mostly they’re there to talk about why A24 was the only place that took a chance on them. The appetite for well-made, in some cases rigorously conceived movies—sometimes placed under the aegis of “arthouse” or “cult”, sometimes associated with independent cinema or the halcyon days of 70s Hollywood—never went away, but A24 seemed to make the creative drought more visible. 

If A24, which has its antecedents in any number of high-profile independent studios, isn’t doing something wholly novel, why do we keep talking about them? In large part because A24 is adept not only at selling itself but making its audience feel good about the purchase. A24’s most enduring accomplishment is the creation of this feeling: everything it produces not only belongs in its roster but can’t be found anywhere else. The scarcity of recent quality mainstream films contributes to the sense that each A24 release, regardless of actual merit, is an event. A24, savvy and discerning in its image, happy to work with big names and small, nakedly ambitious in its quest for awards and for clout, and, most recently, vocal about its intentions to be more than the little studio that could, acts as a generation’s repository for resentments about the state of moviemaking writ large. Noah Sacco, head of film at A24, said, “We get very excited by the idea of changing the mainstream. Broadening or scaling up or whatever you want to call it, is a part of that.”

Now, other companies are stripping its reputation for parts. Take one of the online teasers for the upcoming Marvel film Thunderbolts*. Interspersed between clips above a techno track, the following title cards appear in glitching, neon letters: From the stars of Midsommar, A Different Man, & You Hurt My Feelings; the writers & director of Beef; the cinematographer of The Green Knight; the production designer of Hereditary; the editor of Minari; the composers of Everything Everywhere All At Once. The ad communicates what Marvel’s marketing department assumes its audience wants: the prestige and quality of an A24 film. Pair this with, say, the upcoming A24 Celine Song drama Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal—each the leads of Marvel films, all seeming to retreat back into ostensibly “adult” fare—and one could be forgiven for wondering what the substantive difference between Marvel and A24 is. Maintaining what Nandan, the head of TV and nonfiction, calls the “A24 look and vibe” is as much about exclusion as it is inclusion. A24 doesn’t do every kind of movie, but it wants its audience to believe it could.

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