A24: The Rise of a Cultural Conglomerate
The indie studio is behind some of Hollywood’s biggest hits and critical darlings. It has designs on becoming media’s answer to LVMH.
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Actionable insights
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about A24.
Indie no more. A24 may have started life as a small, indie shop, but the last eleven years have seen it morph into a cinematic powerhouse. At the last Academy Awards, A24’s Everything Everywhere All At Once picked up seven Oscars. It also grossed more than $140 million globally on just a $25 million investment.
The rat hole. Film studios don’t tend to make the best investment. Indeed, one Hollywood producer warned private equity investors that they were throwing money “down a rat hole.” The numbers tell a similar story: just 3.4% of independent films in the US make a profit, and 90% never get a theatrical deal. A24 is beating the odds.
Extremely online. How has A24 thrived in such a challenging industry? Its understanding of internet culture, fandom, and customer acquisition has been critical to its success. Like few other brands – let alone fellow studios – A24 has mastered social media distribution. This is a company that understands how to capture and capitalize on attention.
Moving beyond movies. While A24 is primarily a film studio, the last few years have seen them expand their reach. The maker of Moonlight and other filmic masterpieces is pushing into scripted television, sports documentaries, podcasting, publishing, music, and even cosmetics. It could be the makings of a prestige media conglomerate.
Talent in turmoil. Hollywood is in crisis. After more than two months of striking, the unions representing screenwriters and actors remain locked in a stand-off with the industry’s big studios. The use of artificial intelligence is just one of the issues at stake, but it casts a long shadow. Already, the technology shows signs of upending content creation as we know it. A24 and others will need to be awake to its disruptive power.
Stranded on a beach, a suicidal man finds a washed-up corpse (Daniel Radcliffe). Five minutes later, the man is riding the corpse like a jet ski, powered by the dead fellow’s flatulence. Swiss Army Man, the debut of directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, led to a series of walkouts at Sundance Film Festival, and, initially, only one underwhelming distribution offer from Netflix.
Then A24 appeared. According to Scheinert, A24 was so keen on the film that the firm’s Head of Acquisitions told the directors “he would jump out of a window” if they picked a different partner. While major studios were scared off by a movie about a farting corpse (played by Harry Potter), A24 knew that would be exactly what their core audience – terminally online, culturally-adventurous millennials – would love to watch.
Six years later, the same directing duo, known as “the Daniels,” released a film about a middle-aged, Chinese-American woman who runs a laundromat. On a budget of $25 million, Everything Everywhere All At Once surpassed $140 million at the box office, scooping up seven Academy Awards in the process. On its surface, Everything Everywhere seems antithetical to traditional Oscar fare: it’s a Marvelian-multiverse-sci-fi-comedy, starring an older Asian woman, with subplots involving animate rocks, an enchanted everything bagel, and hot-dog fingers.
The success of the film is a testament to the creators and cast. But it’s also a reflection of the strategy of the studio behind it. As a former studio executive remarked, “You get to an Everything Everywhere All at Once because A24 nurtured the Daniels.”
Since its founding in 2012, the New York-based firm has taken a contrarian path to cinematic success. While Hollywood’s major studios have spent the last decade pumping out superhero vehicles, A24 has embraced creative risk. Rather than looking to underwrite safe bets, founders David Fenkel and Daniel Katz look for true auteurs – then back them to the hilt. From one vantage, it’s an almost venture-like search for outliers; from another, it resembles LVMH’s designer-centric approach. As at Bernard Arnault’s luxury conglomerate, for A24, the artist is sovereign.
So far, it’s worked. Alongside the Daniels, A24 has backed the visionaries behind hits like Uncut Gems, Hereditary, Lady Bird, Midsommar, and Ex Machina. As well as delivering strong returns – and propelling the shop to a $2.5 billion valuation – A24’s filmography has earned critical respect and accumulated rare cultural power. It has become a brand unto itself, celebrated for its weirdness, distinctiveness, and craft. Though the titles mentioned differ in subject matter and style, they possess some shared DNA, an A24 allele, difficult to articulate but there nonetheless. That singular essence has spawned an unusual fandom: moviegoers are not only besotted with individual releases but the studio itself. Consumer devotion of this kind is unusual for those who stand behind the curtain. Though many may love the stories they tell, few would consider themselves Paramount obsessives, Columbia Pictures devotees, MGM ultras.
Like Disney before it, A24 is an exception to this rule. And like the House of Mouse, it has started extending its consumer relationship beyond the screen. Over the past few years, A24 has pushed the borders of its empire, moving into TV, music, publishing, physical experiences, and even cosmetics. It takes little imagination to see the contours A24 is following, to find a redux of Walt’s strategy designed for the 21st century.
A24’s modernity, especially from a tactical perspective, is an underrated aspect of its story. Yes, its success stems from its differentiated taste and unusual support for artists. But it is also a technology story. Social media smarts underpinned the firm’s rise, allowing it to acquire attention much more cost-effectively than its more backward-minded peers. So did its understanding of internet culture, memes, and viral mechanics. Over the past decade, no studio has more efficiently inserted itself into the online zeitgeist, seasoning our feeds with satanic goats and Oscar Isaac dance sequences.
A24’s tech-savvy may make it better placed to weather the existential seiche sweeping across Hollywood. Tensions between talent and the big studios reached a boiling point this summer, resulting in an industry-wide strike. Among these organizations’ demands is an appeal for safeguards around the use of artificial intelligence. Concerns around the misuse of actors’ likenesses are arriving not a moment too late as new models make creation and emulation increasingly life-like. It puts A24 in an interesting position: the champion of talent at a time when their value is in flux. Only time will tell if A24 is a beneficiary or casualty of such a seismic disruption.
To understand A24’s origins, rise, playbook, and future, we conducted deep research and interviewed several senior sources at the studio.