How does A24 do it? The entertainment industry has spent a decade trying to reverse-engineer A24 — low key, because unbridled envy is a bad look. But persistently, in the rooms where it’s safe to ask how a studio built on taste and restraint somehow produced both “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “Backrooms,” and turned its own name into a marketing asset more durable than most IP.
And on that question, its executives remained frustratingly, notoriously silent. They don’t talk about their business, or anyone else’s.
Meanwhile, the damn name supports robust merch, a theater, and a restaurant. People get A24 tattoos. If you’re a young film fan, “A24” has become shorthand for “I like movies as long as they’re cool.”
And Monday, Google DeepMind invested $75 million in A24 to get inside the workflow that built it.
Workflow Becomes IP
Not the A24 library, but the A24 thinking. How A24 does it.
The deal is a non-exclusive research partnership, which gives DeepMind access to A24’s production process in exchange for development of AI infrastructure and tools. Naturally, it’s framed as a responsible AI collaboration in which artists stay in control and the technology serves the vision.
And maybe it is. A24 partner Scott Belsky told the Wall Street Journal the new tools “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with.” I’m sure that’s true, but it’s also not the only part of AI that creates discomfort.
Leaving aside all flammable debates around AI, it’s a little stunning to see A24 spend years fiercely protecting its how and then selling it to the highest bidder.
The deal explicitly excludes A24 data, so Google won’t train on its films. However, A24 opened the filmmaking process itself to negotiation, and the partners hope to collaborate closely with A24 filmmakers.
Taste, Meet Infrastructure
The goal, like many Hollywood-AI partnerships, is to create AI tools for production and distribution. This one hits a little differently because for many indie-film enterprises (and perhaps none more than A24), workflow is culture.
It’s how projects get selected, how filmmakers are encouraged to take risks, and how problems are solved when the answer isn’t “more money.” So while Google can’t access “Moonlight,” it can take a seat in the room where the next “Moonlight” gets made.
All of this comes on the heels of A24’s biggest theatrical hit with “Backrooms.” And, for what it’s worth, Kane Parsons singled out AI in a recent interview as of zero interest beyond interrogating it as a story idea, and identified generative AI as a source of “creative rot.”
Parsons proved that independent creative authority can scale outside the studio system. Also true: His process is now adjacent to a deal that places the development of AI infrastructure inside A24’s workflow.
Of All the People to Tell
It’s reasonable to believe that AI assists for storyboards, reshoots, and editing may move from optional to standard and then become the default. A24 is betting it can take the capital and the infrastructure without ceding the judgment that makes it A24.
Belsky told WSJ that the tools will “preserve creative control and support risk-taking” — which could be a genuine structural commitment, or the thing you say before the tools become load-bearing. We can’t yet know which.
This is what we do know: The most credible argument in independent film, that taste and creative authority are a distribution strategy, is now a research asset.
For filmmakers who view A24 as proof that the filmmaker-first model is economically viable, that’s worth watching. Between Martin Scorsese and Black Forest Labs, and the A24-Google deal, AI now makes its calls from inside the house.
Weekly Recommendations curated by IndieWire Managing Editor Christian Zilko
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If you’re looking to launch your week with a bit of practical advice about your craft, this is a great place to start. While the article is specifically about screenwriting, the general advice — that while every department on a film is an art form, our individual artistry sometimes has to take a backseat to the project’s larger needs — is applicable to anyone working in film and TV.
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3. The $100,000 Confession That Changed How I See Filmmaking by Sophie Katsali
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1. The Unglamorous Financial Realities of Five Indie Filmmakers by Hershal Pandya
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