The popular alternative pt. 2

This is part two 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 and part one in full.

To investors, A24 has proven it can leverage its short but noteworthy legacy into a platform for generating the kind of growth-driven, data-forward interest one normally associates with start-ups. Again, this is a winning formula if one believes that the estimation and generation of cinematic art should be correlated with box-office dollars and valuations, an idea that would seem to fly in the face of the ethos A24 espoused so proudly in earlier years. 

Noah Sacco, A24’s head of film, and Ravi Nandan, A24’s head of TV and nonfiction, are among the company’s few go-to spokespeople. Based on their limited testimony, A24 isn’t worried about losing fans, but rather creating space for new ones, no matter how outwardly nonsensical its methods may seem. One of these is courting auteurs, a longstanding Hollywood obsession emboldened in the 90s during Weinstein’s reign at Miramax.

Take Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go, writer-director of Ex Machina (distributed by A24), Annihilation, and, most recently, co-director of the A24 film Warfare. Garland is a filmmaker of the “cerebral” variety, which means he can be smart and also very annoying. He briefly flirted with quitting filmmaking altogether because it was too exhausting. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the release of what was then A24’s biggest budget project (Josh Safdie’s upcoming table tennis drama Marty Supreme starring Timothée Chalamet has since surpassed it), Civil War, Garland gave a negative endorsement of his own work, announcing that he had fallen out of love with the filmmaking process and would cease directing in the future. Warfare represents his last directorial effort “for the foreseeable future.”

Garland’s 2022 horror film Men, produced by A24, is didactic and boring—stabbing around wildly for the kind of subversive, grisly provocation that inspires cult followings. That A24 promoted that film so enthusiastically before its release is indicative of their faith in Garland but also their more cynical attempts at fomenting discourse. That they would turn to Garland again to helm their first original IMAX feature indicates an essential fact about how they operate: A24 chases the viewer rather than the other way around. 

Civil War dramatizes an American catastrophe that makes literal the political divisions tearing the country apart, with warring territories, a cartoonishly evil President, and roving bands of murderous soldiers. There is no political allegory or message worth parsing (which isn’t to say it lacks an allegory or message) and it is better, instead, to think of Civil War as a brainier-than-average action movie with excellent sound design.

Still, Civil War didn’t need to become a blockbuster (though it stands as A24’s second highest-grossing film domestically) to justify A24’s shifting focus. Franchises, summer smashes, the “A24 version of The Hills or Laguna Beach”, a prospect Nandan, the head of TV and nonfiction, thinks the company could “crush”—everything is on the table so long as it keeps the conversation going. A24’s singularity is no longer a matter for debate, at least in the public eye, but it’s difficult to maintain people’s attention for long. One might do so with a combination of variety, frequency, and proportion, but what matters most is the sense that the same value is being delivered. This projection of quality, true or not, is now being performed by A24’s audience. Brand loyalty obviates the need to differentiate between product and art. 

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