How A24 happened — and why the next A24 won't look like A24

A24 was founded in 2012 by three former mid-level entertainment executives — Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges — with $25 million in initial funding from the private equity arm of Guggenheim Partners. It was not founded to make prestige arthouse cinema. It was founded to acquire and distribute films that fell between the cracks of the existing studio system: too small for the majors, too formally challenging for genre labels, too American for international arthouse distributors.

The first few years were acquisition-driven. Spring Breakers (2013, acquired from Wild Bunch), Under the Skin (2014, acquired from UK production), The Witch (2015, acquired from TIFF). The company's original function was not production but distribution — finding finished films and marketing them to an audience that the films' original producers had not fully identified.

The acquisition pattern that worked

What A24 figured out, before most distributors, was that a specific urban demographic in its 20s and early 30s had developed tastes that the studio system was not servicing. This demographic had grown up with the Criterion Collection, with film school, with the internet's capacity for deep-cut film discovery. They wanted slow burn, they wanted weird, they wanted genre work that was formally serious. They were willing to travel to an art-house theater for a horror film if the horror film in question was The Witch.

The marketing was as important as the acquisitions. A24's social media presence — which built an aesthetic identity around the films as objects of connoisseurship rather than entertainment products — created a brand loyalty that other distributors had not achieved. When the A24 logo appears before a film, a specific subset of viewers makes assumptions about quality that they do not make for, say, a Lionsgate release. Brand trust of this kind usually takes decades to build. A24 built it in five years.

The production arm grew out of the distribution success. Moonlight (2016, produced with Plan B Entertainment), Lady Bird (2017), Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). The run of commercial and critical success between 2016 and 2022 is unusual by any measure. It was also, structurally, unrepeatable.

Why 2016-2022 won't come back

Three conditions made the A24 golden period possible, and all three have since eroded.

The first was the theatrical market for mid-budget films. In 2016, a film like Moonlight — $1.5 million budget, no stars, long takes, three-act structure organized around a single character at three life stages — could open on 46 screens, expand to 651 screens, and gross $27.9 million domestically. The economics worked. By 2022, that same film would likely have been made for a streaming platform, seen by a larger absolute audience, and generated approximately zero water-cooler conversation because streaming consumption is diffuse in a way that theatrical is not. The theatrical mid-budget arthouse market contracted sharply post-pandemic and has not recovered.

The second was A24's own brand saturation. The company's aesthetic identity became so legible — the particular color grade, the pacing, the tonal register — that by 2021 it had its own critical backlash vocabulary. "A24-ification" entered the discourse as a mild pejorative meaning a kind of self-conscious arthouse brand signaling. When your style becomes a shorthand, the style has peaked. The next generation of filmmakers who want to do something genuinely different will, correctly, avoid looking like A24.

The third was the talent pipeline. The filmmakers who defined the company's prestige run — Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Yorgos Lanthimos, Greta Gerwig, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — have grown into directors whose films cost more, whose deals are more complex, and who have leverage that they did not have in 2016. Aster's Beau Is Afraid (2023) had a $35 million budget. That is a different production culture from Midsommar at $9 million.

What comes next

The structural gap that A24 filled in 2012 still exists. Mid-budget films for adults with developed taste do not have a reliable theatrical home in 2026. What does not exist is the specific market window A24 exploited — an arthouse theatrical audience that was large enough to sustain mid-budget production economics and underserved enough that a single distributor could claim the territory.

The successor to A24's function will probably not be another acquisition-and-distribution company with a charismatic brand identity. It will more likely be a combination of streaming platform curation (a streamer with the credibility to function as a prestige filter, the way the Criterion Channel does for the back catalogue), festival acquisition at the lower end, and possibly a new kind of subscription theatrical model. The Alamo Drafthouse chain was moving in this direction before its 2020 bankruptcy; its revival may resume that path.

What the films themselves will look like is less certain. The directors who will define the next wave have not yet had their A24 moment. They are making films right now that will either find distribution or won't, that will either reach the audience they were made for or die on a hard drive. The films we try to surface here — the ones that exist at the edges of the discovery algorithms — are mostly those films. The discovery machinery will catch up. It usually does. It took Heaven's Gate thirty years.

Sources & further reading

• The Atlantic — How A24 Built a Movie Empire (2022)
• The Guardian — profile of A24 at 10 years
• The New York Times — A24 After the Gold Rush (2022)
• Follows, Stephen. The Mid-Budget Movie Problem (self-published data report, 2023) — industry data on theatrical mid-budget contraction.