Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Photo / Supplied
In the 11 years that A24 have been releasing and making films, they have spawned a weirdly obsessive cult following.
Cults typically spring up around films; rarely distributors. You don’t get teenagers strolling around in fleeces trademarked with, say, Focus Features or Sony Pictures Classics, while dialling in to the company’s official podcast.
And yet A24, with its combination of hip genre savvy and digital marketing nous, has broken through as the cool kid among America’s film stables, envied by many a studio’s speciality division, with the merchandise to match.
Thanks to the barnstorming success of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a strong favourite for the Best Picture Oscar which also scooped 10 Bafta nominations, the A24 fandom has scaled new heights during the current awards season.
Their other contenders this year include Causeway, Aftersun, Close, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and The Whale, adding up to a company record of 18 Oscar nominations.
The r/A24 sub-Reddit has over 90,000 subscribers, more than Harry Styles. Courtesy of the company’s online store, you can buy EEAAO-themed multiverse pins, hot dog finger gloves and even a trophy candle that’s the shape of Jamie Lee Curtis’s butt plug. With that sitting on the mantlepiece, who even needs an Oscar?
The company started small. Launched in 2012, it was the brainchild of three men, Daniel Katz, David Fenkel and John Hodges, with connections to film financing and private equity. Their name was apparently inspired by a chance encounter on an Italian autostrada.
“I always had dreams of [starting a company],” recalled Katz in a rare interview.
“And on some level, honestly, I was afraid to go out on my own and try to make it work. And I was with a bunch of friends, and we were in the south of Italy, and we were driving into Rome and I kind of had this moment of clarity. And it was on the A24 [motorway]. And in that moment I was like: Now it’s time to go do this.”
Their early releases, including Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), were all shrewd acquisitions – “edgy” independent projects, with hot stars and youth appeal, which they turned into hits by targeting film fans on social media.
By leveraging Oscar Isaac’s dance routine in the latter film into a viral TikTok meme, or making a sensation out of James Franco’s “Look at my sh-t!” Spring Breakers monologue, they built a brand.
Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2015) – rather less meme-able, but a great film and profound cultural moment – was A24′s first move into production.
The out-of-nowhere $1.5m drama about a black teenager’s sexual identity crisis, stunned Hollywood when it took the Best Picture Oscar. (At least, when the correct envelope was found, at the end of that year’s legendarily botched ceremony.)
Meanwhile, the company’s executives were busy nurturing the sharpest talents at the vanguard of a new wave of horror films – sometimes snootily called “elevated” horror, though this label is much disdained by the genre’s partisans.
Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) and Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) became the in-house golden boys; suddenly half of A24′s releases were not only cult sensations, but films about cults.
The reputation got out that these films were messed up, packed with portents you could easily miss without an online explainer, which was exactly why they were green-lit in the first place.
The marketing always led the way, guiding these scripts into existence by knowing the only thing no one could sell on the cheap was “normal”.
A24′s remit – the weirder the better – was simple but increasingly effective.
It didn’t have to be horror – witness the rise of EEAAO’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively Daniels, or the reinvention of Adam Sandler as a splenetic gambling addict in Uncut Gems (2019).
The promotion of all these films featured some inspired, off-the-wall ideas, which cost almost nothing, while creating online engagement worth its weight in Bitcoin.
For Ex Machina, A24′s minions created a Tinder bot at South by Southwest, posing as Alicia Vikander’s character. Black Phillip, the diabolical goat from The Witch, got his own Twitter account and a grassroots campaign for an Oscar nomination.
“They make things work that according to standard procedures really shouldn’t work,” said Garland in 2017. “And I’m not saying they’re magicians. I think what they’ve understood is there’s a sufficient number of people out there who want more challenging or different material. And they’re aiming at them.”
The previous film by Daniels, Swiss Army Man (2016), had premiered underwhelmingly at Sundance, with little interest from buyers. Who wanted the film starring Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse?
The answer was: A24, who knew the sheer wackiness of the concept was almost self-marketing.
They had fun with it regardless, devising an online game where you could throw an avatar of Radcliffe around like a rag doll, sext it, and use its erection as a compass.
The game – Meet Your Best Friend Manny – won a Clio award for creativity in advertising.
If the off-kilter derangement of EEAAO, which has topped US$100m (NZ$163m) at the global box office, feels like peak A24, it’s really just the latest peak.
The branding has become a shtick everyone recognises when they see it. They’ve become masters of trailers that seek to highlight the uniqueness of each film – Waves, In Fabric, Zola, Minari, Men – which, to be fair, are projects of pretty rampant diversity in tone and subject, at least considered separately.
And yet, under the umbrella of that artfully blurred company logo, everything A24 is releasing is starting to look comfortably unique.
It’s not too far removed from Miramax branding of the late 1990s, when films such as Good Will Hunting (1997) or The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) prevailed with their semi-independent, gritty-yet-glossy sensibility.
Unlike Miramax, however, which had a very public face in the shape of Harvey Weinstein, A24 tends to hide behind that logo: You couldn’t pluck its founders, who rarely do press, out of a line-up.
And yet this impersonal branding makes the company seem all the more masked and anonymous, with the perma-sheen of a corporate identity.
When “indie” gets stamped with that, everyone’s well aware that it risks losing its cool, no matter how fantastic the individual titles are.
Some A24 projects have already flirted with self-parody, such as last year’s horror-satire Bodies Bodies Bodies, an entertaining parlour game which rode in with the tagline “This is Not a Safe Space”, and sold itself to a Gen Z crowd precisely by spiking them wickedly in the ribs.
It saw through the hypocrisy of all the people on screen, and needed you to know that, but still threw the pool party everyone had to be seen at, with the most A24 soundtrack imaginable, and the most neon-soaked palette since Spring Breakers.
If EEAAO hogs the awards glory this year, as looks feasible, A24 will have beaten Netflix to Best Picture, and will certainly have a lot to crow about.
But their accumulated cachet may start to feel top-heavy, and you can bet reviews will get sterner: The hallmarks of what they’re making will be low-hanging fruit for critical eye-rolling.
Their next major prospect is Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, a three-hour-long surrealist horror-comedy spanning decades and starring Joaquin Phoenix as a paranoid entrepreneur: In other words, you get a whiff of that A24 musk a mile off.
It could be wonderful; it could be the darling of die-hards who spend whole days defending it online; it could be both. For devotees, it’s probably the most anticipated release of the year.
Last year in Cannes, I met a film student from Hungary sporting a home-made A24 T-shirt, which his sister had printed for him; he lost it somewhere in Albania, and she made another one.
This fan-generated swag, even more than their limited-edition hoodies, tote bags or “all access” membership passes, suggests an obsession that runs deep.
Right now, the only cult that thinks it’s cooler than A24 is the cult of knocking it – an invisible lapel pin proudly sported by those in the know, with secret handshakes and, well, no films to show for it. The paid-up fanbase will surely take the hot streak.
Not everyone everywhere vibes with its wacky cosmology, but the box office reigns supreme, with over $100m scooped worldwide. What the Daniels have to offer is a singular trip, to say the least – and it’s made the biggest cultural splash of anything A24 have put out to date, not least because of career-capping roles for Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan.
Alicia Vikander’s turn now – not as an alien, but a hyper-intelligent robot, whose father-creator (Oscar Isaac) plans to upgrade her, wiping her current personality. After numerous screenwriting gigs (28 Days Later, Sunshine), Garland debuted with icy assurance as a director. His film beat out huge competition to the Best VFX Oscar.
A24′s first horror smash, a sylvan nightmare set in 1630s New England, among a family of Puritan dissenters whose baby is taken. Eggers hereby announced himself as a woodcut artisan with a perfectionist’s eye for period authenticity, inventing Anya Taylor-Joy as the teenager who may or may not be a depraved cultist.
If there was justice, this splendid film would have been all over the 2016 Oscar lists, instead of receiving a lone screenplay nod. Where was Annette Bening? Her portrait of a single mother muddling through late adulthood in pre-Reagan-era Santa Barbara was a career peak, in a pitch-perfect ensemble piece, quilted with seriocomic warmth.
No one figured that the $1.5m Moonlight would have the journey it did, awards-wise. The story of Chiron, a withdrawn black kid in Miami growing up gay, was told in triptych, and approached his self-discovery as a semi-mythic odyssey. Beyond breaking ground as a coming-out story with an all-black cast, it was gorgeous, and movingly acted.
Few mother-daughter relationships have been observed lately with the spiky tenderness of this one, between Saoirse Ronan’s dreaming high-schooler and Laurie Metcalf’s uber-practical nurse, a martyr of thrift. Gerwig’s solo directing debut invested bankable coming-of-age formulae with fresh, zesty feminine insight.
Along came A24′s other in-house horror weirdo, Ari Aster, with this bleak knockout about an accursed family, a hideous vision of dollhouse despair. No matter how bad you think things are going to get for the Grahams, headed by an evisceratingly intense Toni Collette, they get worse. Their unravelling made even jaded genre obsessives grip their seats.
And back Aster bounced, with the sun-blasted, eerily chirpy saga of a Swedish pagan retreat, which descends into the most daylit nightmare since The Wicker Man. This one’s very funny as well as ghastly, with Aster’s wicked Dionysian sensibility leading us to queasy revelations, and Florence Pugh absolutely nailing her role as a traumatised human piñata.
A24 have Reichardt’s next one, Showing Up, waiting in the wings. First Cow might be her finest achievement so far, a tale of property rights, male friendship, and oily cakes in the Oregon Territory of the 1820s. The sudden arrival of Covid made it a succès d’estime on VOD platforms, and one still worth seeing out.
Perfect timing, after Joker, for Joaquin Phoenix’s least pushy, most rumpled and relatable performance, as a grieving radio producer given sudden charge of his nephew (the pinball-like, impressively believable Woody Norman). What follows is a city symphony, an adult-child bonding session, and classic Mike Mills in every detail.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.