It has been six years since the Academy Awards ended with an old-guard error that culminated in a shock of the new. After a now-infamous envelope mixup involving Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the megahit studio musical La La Land ultimately lost the best picture Oscar to Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ low-budget character study of a Black gay man’s coming of age. Moonlight was released by the hip, still-green indie studio A24, then only four years into its existence. It was the very first film A24 had produced from the outset, after establishing itself by acquiring and distributing finished products: it could hardly believe its beginner’s luck.
Fast-forward to this year’s Oscar race, and A24 is no longer David but Goliath, with the heavily tipped best picture frontrunner Everything Everywhere All at Once. Directed by wacky duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, it’s a genre-bending fusion of comedy, action, sci-fi and immigrant family drama that surprised everyone last spring by racking up more than $100m worldwide. That made it the biggest hit in A24’s 10-year history, the crown jewel of a portfolio that includes Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020) and Ari Aster’s cultish art-horror films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).
With 11 nominations, Everything Everywhere All at Once leads the Oscar field; A24, likewise, is the leader among studios, having also secured nominations in various categories for its films Aftersun, The Whale, Causeway, Close and Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. And this kingmaker status has been achieved with surprisingly few concessions to the mainstream.
An eccentric, bawdy teacup ride set across a dizzying multiverse, with a predominantly Asian cast and a surfeit of butt-plug gags, Everything Everywhere All at Once was initially nobody’s idea of box-office gold, let alone Oscar bait. Few would have seen it coming after Kwan and Scheinert’s previous film, Swiss Army Man (2016), a perverse buddy comedy between an island castaway and a farting corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe. It was a commercial non-starter but A24 bought it, deeming Kwan and Scheinert a team worth investing in.
Film-maker Lulu Wang, whose bittersweet Chinese-language family drama The Farewell was released by A24 in 2019, suggests that is typical of its long-game approach. “A24’s brand is intertwined with the identities of the artists that it works with, and [is] known for championing unique voices,” she says. “At the same time, they just have a really incredible ability to identify the zeitgeist before everybody else has. They set the trend.”
“Voice” is a word that comes up a lot when you talk to people at A24 or the artists who have worked with them. The company works almost exclusively with writer-directors, and distinctiveness of tone and storytelling is the ideological theme connecting its increasingly disparate projects.
Jenkins finds kinship in that loose bond: he has yet to direct another film with the studio since Moonlight, but two titles he recently produced – Aftersun, starring Paul Mescal, and Raven Jackson’s lyrical Sundance premiere All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – are in the A24 family. “I still feel connected to them. One of the really cool things they do with film-makers is that you do feel like you’re a part of this thing. And that’s where Film Twitter starts to dunk, like, ‘Yeah, Barry Jenkins is part of the A24 cult,’” he says with a laugh.
Still, Jenkins resists the idea – propagated by industry folk – of “A24 films” as a kind of genre unto themselves. “Everything that’s happening in the industry right now is about making voices seem the same,” he says. “And so when you say an A24 film is recognisable, it’s kind of a misnomer because you think: ‘Oh, all these things are alike.’ I think instead what those folks have done really well is to allow film-makers to be idiosyncratic within the A24 banner. You go to their films and you expect something fresh, something in the maker’s voice.”
“I suspect that to fans of theirs it means a certain left-of-centre narrative, something ‘weird’ or ‘quirky’ in the film-making, but not quite antagonistic,” says film-maker Chad Hartigan of the A24 brand; his gentle, Sundance-awarded comedy Morris From America was acquired by the company in 2016. “Movies that are misfit children who just don’t belong anywhere else, which is what my film felt like to me.”
Misfit kids were the target when A24 was founded in 2012 by New Yorkers Daniel Katz, David Fenkel and John Hodges – who were aiming to draw a young, very-online audience away from the multiplex and towards specialist cinema, a distribution sector then largely built around older or more rarefied viewers.
The pace-setter in the field at that time was still Harvey Weinstein, still a few years away from his #MeToo downfall. The Weinstein Company could still conjure up huge box office success and armloads of trophies for notionally “independent” middlebrow fare such as The King’s Speech (2010) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but artistic edge wasn’t his top priority. In the US, the global recession had put paid to a number of adventurous indie companies. The gap was open, then, for a true indie that nonetheless applied a bit of polish and glitter to its acquisitions. A24 took it. “I think they arrived at an opportune time when speciality distributors were closing or becoming more risk-averse, so there were interesting, commercial-adjacent films out there that needed a home,” says Hartigan.
In February 2013, A24’s first release, Roman Coppola’s comedy A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, sank without trace. Its name would be made over the remainder of the year, however, with a trio of sophisticated youth-oriented works: Harmony Korine’s girls-gone-wild provocation Spring Breakers, Sofia Coppola’s swaggering true-crime caper The Bling Ring, and James Ponsoldt’s tender high-school romance The Spectacular Now. Luring young viewers in with teen idols such as Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, only to shock them with sex, nihilistic violence and loose, cryptic storytelling, Korine’s film encapsulates A24’s approach to converting new arthouse fans: maybe one in 10 kids would like it, but that one would become a loyal disciple.
The following year, titles such as Jonathan Glazer’s hypnotic sci-fi enigma Under the Skin and JC Chandor’s moody, 70s-styled crime drama A Most Violent Year expanded A24’s reach to discerning older viewers. Awards attention came soon after: in 2016, Lenny Abrahamson’s abduction drama Room nabbed the company its first best picture nomination, and a best actress win for Brie Larson, while Asif Kapadia’s hit documentary Amy (2015) and Alex Garland’s eerie android puzzler Ex Machina (2014) also took home trophies.
This rapid three-year ascendance set the stage for A24, having acquired a reputation for high-class acquisitions, to begin producing its own films of a similar calibre. Enter Moonlight. The company was looking for an exciting script from a rising talent that wouldn’t require much of a budget; Jenkins had tried to take his intimate, structurally ambitious project to other production companies with little success.
“I remember once seeing an article describing Moonlight as the most obvious A24 kind of film,” says Jenkins, “and that’s just revisionist because we tried with multiple entities to make this film. There was nothing obvious about it. And A24 was the one place that was, like: ‘Make this film your way, and we actually think you need more than you’re asking for to make it. Please go and do as good a job as you can.’”
Jenkins’ film, modest as it is, set A24 on a path to increasingly mainstream fashionability, perhaps faster than it had planned. Today, it has evolved into a brand as much as a studio: its slick website features an online shop where you can buy a vast assortment of clothing and merchandise related to its films (a jokey pair of official Everything Everywhere All at Once hotdog gloves will set you back $36) and the homepage for its podcast, where A24 titles are genially discussed by the talent involved.
Such developments foster demonstrative loyalty from its still predominantly young acolytes: on film Twitter or the social media site Letterboxd, student-age film lovers speak of A24 releases as a kind of formative syllabus. On the flipside, from more sceptical cinephiles, such branding invites accusations of selling out. The film-makers are not so precious. “You look at a film like The Farewell and think: ‘Oh, is it OK to sell stuffed animals associated with this piece of art?’” says Jenkins. “And maybe in a purist sense, that’s not auteurism, that’s not cinema, and there’s something uncouth about it. Yet I think that in order for the company to remain robust, opening up the art to these commercial opportunities is part of that.”
He cites All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt as a film that has been a trickle-down beneficiary of such commercial tactics. “Raven just made her first feature with this company completely uncompromised, aesthetically and artistically. And if selling, you know, vinyls of [medieval fantasy epic] The Green Knight’s score – which is dope, by the way – if that helps her secure financing for a film, I think that’s a really wonderful thing.”
But A24 is growing up. The company is gearing up for the release of its largest-scale production yet in Alex Garland’s action epic Civil War – not quite a Marvel-scale enterprise, but a blockbuster by its refined standards, and an indication of its interest in producing more mainstream art while still nurturing the small and the special. It has branched out into television production, with the smash-hit moody teen melodrama Euphoria, and expanded its international reach, working with non-US film-makers such as Claire Denis, Joanna Hogg and Gaspar Noé, and distributing films outside the United States, too.
Such moves will win it new fans; others, put off by such expansion, may get into more esoteric fare and experimental labels, using A24 as their gateway. I remember seeing a tattoo of the studio’s ident – not a stick-on – emblazoned on the shoulder of a young film festival attender last year. Perhaps in another 10 years’ time she will still sport it proudly. Or perhaps by then the brand’s identity then will be more diffuse, less chic.
Lulu Wang, for one, is happy for A24 to do whatever it takes to keep getting good work made and seen at a time when cinemas are struggling. “The world has changed. Our industry has changed. And who is saving cinema?” she asks. “We have to draw people to theatres. And we don’t want the tentpoles to be the only things on offer. If A24 are able to continue getting independent films made, and protecting the voices that make those independent films, I don’t care if it has to come with a mug.”
This year’s Academy Awards coverage starts 12 March, 10pm, Sky Cinema Oscars & Now; you can follow our liveblog, plus news and reaction at theguardian.com/film
