A24 has gazed upon the multiverse of madness, and it likes what it sees. Following the $100-million success and Oscar sweep for the Marvel-esque Everything Everywhere All At Once, A24 is looking to pull a page from the Netflix playbook: Leveraging its arthouse and awards show bonafides into more commercial prospects. Per The Wrap, A24 is looking into “action and big IP projects” while “deemphasizing the traditional character/auteur-driven dramas.” While the report comes from a series of anonymous sources, it does make a lot of sense. In March 2022, The Wrap also reported that A24, the scrappy upstart of the film world, was valued at $2.5 billion. The massive number led the report’s sources to agree that this company must start making money.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once was the first A24 movie to make $100 million, and it says a lot about the company’s future. With seven Oscar wins, near-universal acclaim, and a fervent fanbase that won’t tolerate critics who don’t shower it with praise at every opportunity, Everything Everywhere All At Once was the studio’s side-step into mainstream filmmaking—even if it didn’t immediately read as such. The movie, produced by Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo, borrowed the multiverse MacGuffin of Marvel’s current string of releases to create something that resonated with audiences in greater numbers. But Everything Everywhere All At Once was a blip in A24’s balance sheets. The company might have strong brand awareness and a top-notch swag game, but no one went to see Beau Is Afraid or The Green Knight, two higher-budget auteur-driven fantasies that aren’t as audience-friendly as EEAAO. As one agent tells The Wrap, “Auteur film labels never last unless they stay small […] A24 will obviously win awards, but there’s only so long you can lose money.”
Of course, maybe A24 could, um, stay small. Plenty of people love A24 for Everything Everywhere All At Once, but others love them for off-beat thrillers like Uncut Gems and arthouse experiments about whether it’s okay to masturbate when your roommate’s home, like The Lighthouse—both of which doubled their budgets at the box office and will probably enjoy plenty of replay on streamers and VOD. Celine Song’s Past Lives has also proved to be a bit of a sleeper hit because A24 didn’t play the regular game of dumping it on VOD too early.
However, the company isn’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A24 is also known for a string of original horror movies. It’s already begun its quest to grow that reputation through established I.P. Last month, Bloody Disgusting reported that A24 was actively pursuing the television rights to Halloween, which followed the announcement that A24 was producing a Friday The 13th spin-off, Crystal Lake for Peacock. Horror is a space that A24 has found great success in, even if it usually means tricking people into seeing a horror movie that’s just a metaphor for trauma. It is a bit strange, though, to see A24 jump into horror reboots when the first two parts of its Ti West’s horror trilogy, X and Pearl (the third part, MaXXXine, will likely be released next year), have made great use of all those slasher tropes. To put a point on it, both X and Pearl were reportedly produced for $1 million (though that’s probably not an exact figure, it’s probably in the ballpark) and each grossed more than $10 million at the box office. Similarly, they’re both destined to be home video classics, played at sleepovers from here to eternity.
We’re not saying that A24 can’t produce popular I.P. projects alongside arthouse fare. But this is a familiar strategy we’ve seen with streamers, which released a slew of auteur-driven Oscar hopefuls (Roma, The Irishman) when jumping into originals, only to pivot to $500 million vaporware action vehicles (The Gray Man) after establishing some credibility. Maybe A24 can find a balance that works for the audience and the bank alike, and perhaps that doesn’t include releasing 15 movies and six TV shows in a single year.