The A24 formula
Photo: A24/Mike Buzadji
If you were to go ahead and google the most recent quirky, occult-spooky, wacky or slightly boring movie that you watched in the cinema, there’s a pretty good chance that it was distributed by A24. Despite only being founded 11 years ago, the output of the studio has generated sixteen Academy Awards, including two Best Pictures (Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All At Once). Their status as an ‘indie’ film studio is getting pretty debateable to say the least.
So what gives? All the oldheads of Hollywood and NY Times journalists have been telling us that cinema has been lying dead and buried at the bottom of a pile of Disney dollars for the last decade at least. How did A24 manage to grow so quickly whilst only selling tickets to people that like to call movies ‘films’? Well, first and foremost because that isn’t really true – at least not anymore. A24 might have started outside of the sphere of ‘mainstream’ audiences, but Everything Everywhere grossed over $140 million. The stated aim of the studio at its founding was to attract the new online generation away from summer blockbusters, toward films where directors and writers were given more artistic liberty. Coming out of the back of the recession era of the late 2010s, A24 saw a vacuum for that sort of studio and made their home in it.
That unique offering, combined with either a shrewd eye for picking diamonds from the rough or a significant amount of luck, enabled A24 to build a loyal following amongst both consumers and filmmakers. Personally, I think no small part of their success is due to their partnership with Ari Aster, director of Hereditary and Midsommar and one of the experts spearheading the modern, surprisingly popular horror genre. Out of all A24’s films (bar Moonlight and Everything Everywhere), those are the ones that I’ve heard people talking about the most, regardless of whether they’d claim to be ‘film fans’. Maybe something about films like that enables them to break out of the potentially unappealing dullness or aloof-ness that people might usually associate with ‘arthouse’ cinema.
Their reputation for quirky or left-field films has led fans and critics alike to coin ‘A24’ as a genre in and of itself. Whether that will help or limit their success in the future remains to be seen, but after this year’s Academy Awards, they’ve certainly established themselves as a Hollywood main player.
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