A24 taught an entire generation of cinephiles that it was okay to be weird. Since its founding in 2012, the film studio and distributor has specialized in auteurist arthouse fare, the kind of films that the big studios would find too risky to make. Under the Skin, Ex Machina, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lighthouse, and Beau is Afraid are just a few of the off-kilter movies from visionary directors that the company has released — and often steered to far more commercial success than rival studios could have expected.
A24’s Brand Is Changing
The best example of A24’s fusion of weirdness and winning is Everything Everywhere All At Once, the 2022 sci-fi kung fu flick that A24 financed, believed in, and pushed to earn $143.4 million at the box office and seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Even at the lower-tier mid-budget price point (somewhere between $14.3 million and $25 million), Everything Everywhere was a risky movie, an original multiversal action dramedy where key emotional beats were communicated through googly-eyed rocks and women with hot dog fingers. It’s not a favorite of mine, but I’ve always been impressed and happy that it found so much success.
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The credits let you know where the filmmakers stand, and I want to see more of that.
But, in recent years, A24 has been putting out more movies that are, well, kinda normal. Alex Garland’s Civil War was the kind of gritty war movie (albeit with a near-future setting) that’s easy to imagine being financed by a major studio in the early 2000s. Warfare, Garland’s next film (which he co-directed with first-time filmmaker Ray Mendoza), looks even more down-the-middle, an equally gritty war movie set during the Iraq War. It wouldn’t be out of place alongside ‘90s, ‘00s, and early ‘10s hits like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and American Sniper.
Those were all major studio movies, but major studio efforts to guide war movies to box office success have failed in recent years. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare both flopped, and Lee got little attention. Some, like Greyhound, Da 5 Bloods, and Blitz are hard to evaluate because they were streaming-only movies, but of the 2020s war movies that have hit theaters, Civil War is the only real success — bringing in $127.3 million on a $50 million budget. Warfare is tracking to have a strong opening weekend, too.
A Romantic Dramedy With Big Stars Can Be “An A24 Movie” Now
The trailer for The Materialists, a romantic dramedy starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans, highlights that A24 is working to bring back other broadly appealing genres, too. The film’s writer-director, Celine Song, previously made Past Lives, a romantic drama that enjoyed box office success and Oscar nominations. Last year’s We Live in Time also did well commercially, and it’s a pretty traditional romantic weepy in the tradition of Love Story. Babygirl was a bit more adventurous, but was tame by the standards of the erotic thriller genre. It also did well at the box office.
A24 is really good at guiding unlikely movies to success. It got The Zone of Interest — an avant-garde Holocaust movie — to $52.8 million. But it is increasingly using its clout to resurrect mid-budget movies in a wide range of genres that the big studios don’t know what to do with anymore. They aren’t always big financial successes. Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings, a dramedy in the vein of James L. Brooks or Woody Allen, is one of A24’s most “normal” movies, and it failed to connect. But A24 has spent over a decade becoming “the cool kids table” and is now using that hipness to get audiences out for less obviously hip movies. If you’ve wanted to see movies in your local theater that aren’t big IP, A24 is making that happen. Increasingly, they’re movies that your mom and dad might be interested in seeing, too.
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