Sometimes, a movie gains traction because of its stacked cast; sometimes, the film has a great director behind it. However, only one studio has been successful by name alone: A24.
The production studio A24 is home to fan favorites such as Hereditary, Lady Bird, and The Florida Project, as well as Oscar winners like The Brutalist, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Moonlight. It has amassed such a cult following that it even sells exclusive A24 merchandise.
So, how has the studio, which will be just 13 in August, been able to compete with film giants like Paramount and Universal? The answer is simple: by doing less.
A24’s Beginning
On Aug. 20, 2012, Variety announced that Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges would launch a new company called A24. The studio would finance, produce, and distribute films with eight to ten annual releases.
To begin with, the trio focused on distributing independent films, saving money by not having to fund a full shoot. They also used social media and word-of-mouth marketing rather than traditional methods like billboards and large adverts. This may seem normal now, but in 2013, Facebook was less than ten years old, and Instagram was turning three, so the approach was considered innovative.
The first film A24 released, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, made $12,000 on opening weekend, according to IMDbPro. Five weeks later, the studio released its third film and first hit: Spring Breakers. The movie made $263,002 domestically upon release.
Spring Breakers took Disney Channel innocents Selena Gomez and Ashley Tisdale and threw them into a life of crime and drugs. The film also starred Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, and James Franco as a humorous drug dealer with cornrows and grills.
Although the reviews of Spring Breakers were not great, the movie was funny and memorable, with memes and soon-to-be-iconic photos of the cast circulating online. Since then, A24’s social media marketing and word-of-mouth strategy have been the main drivers of these movies.
What makes a24 different
Nate Jones, a senior writer at Vulture and A24 connoisseur, analyzed the studio’s success in a video by Vox. According to Jones, one of A24’s founding principles is to “give filmmakers almost unprecedented creative freedom.”
That is the difference.
By entrusting filmmakers to tell the stories they want in the way they want to, A24 avoids telling stories that have already been told and keeps its collection fresh. Instead of another superhero movie or live-action princess story, A24 releases films about the complexities of a relationship between a suburban black family, like in Waves, or the story of a man who changed himself to fit in and ends up missing the life he had when he was different, like in A Different Man.
A24 takes a chance on those filmmakers, launching the careers of Greta Gerwig, who debuted with A24’s Lady Bird, and the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shienert), whose first film as a duo was A24’s Swiss Army Man. This was also the case with Barry Jenkins and his now Oscar-winning film Moonlight.
Awards for a24
A24 produced its first film, Moonlight, in 2016 and chose Jenkins to take the reigns. He had only directed one feature film before that, in 2008, but that did not matter. Jenkins told the story of a Black man as he grew up and came to terms with his racial and sexual identities.
The studio immediately won its first Best Picture Oscar in the infamous La La Land/Moonlight mix-up. A24 now has another with Everything Everywhere All at Once, as well as a plethora of nominations.
A24 also has a stake in television. The studio has collected 56 Emmy nominations and 19 wins for Netflix’s BEEF and HBO’s The Idol and Euphoria.
While awards are not everything, A24’s critical success proves the pull it has not only with its fans but also with its peers.
A24 in 2025
The studio has several films hitting the silver screen in 2025. Death of a Unicorn, a horror film starring Paul Judd and Jenna Ortega, was released on March 28. The trailer for Materialists, a romance starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal, just dropped and is already generating buzz.
Warfare stars all the young male heartthrobs you could think of, including Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton, in the story of Navy SEALs during the war in Iraq. It comes out on April 11, 2025.
Nobody knows what makes A24 so special or why the studio has been able to consistently make films that resonate with the public much faster than Universal, Fox, or Paramount. But the studio is just getting started, and I cannot wait to see what else they have up their sleeve.