3 Paths for the A24 Movie
Since 2012, A24 has released 112 fictional feature films. Some fit the reputation A24 has acquired: auteur driven, visually stunning. Some are absolutely terrible. And some are mediocre but rigorously on-brand. A brief guide to the good, the bad, and the vibe-y.
tural capital. This was the era of Good Time, the cult hit that cemented the studio’s association with the downtown streetwear scene (Pete Davidson was a huge fan), and the year after the Lower East Side opening of art-house-cinema hot spot the Metrograph, where A24 directors like Ari Aster were seen hobnobbing at the upstairs cantina. The Ion Pack, which has built a podcast empire skewering the cinephile culture A24 represents, pinpoints this as the moment when A24-branded hats and hoodies began popping up in places like Soho House. “It’s mood-board culture,” says Curtis Everett Pawley, the other half of the duo. “A lot of ‘creatives’ love to find obvious art-film references to put on a mood board for fashion videos and album campaigns. A24 became a bridge, merging this mood-board, influencer, pop-culture Zeitgeist with art-house movies made by real directors.” You might say it was here that the A24 brand began to represent not movies but vibes—in the words of philosopher Robin James, a way to “connect status-laden people to statusladen cultural objects and practices.”
The writer Will Harrison, who used to work at the Metrograph, calls 2019 the year “that memeable A24 thing crystallized, to me at least,” he says. That was the year of Midsommar, The Lighthouse, and Uncut Gems: three of the studio’s biggest viral hits, all released within a six-month span. “And then you have covid. Culture was fully stagnant. All we had was parsing over shit and canonizing it.” As cultural life moved online, A24 fandom filtered down to the digital middle classes through spaces like Letterboxd and online-dating profiles, at which point it followed a familiar pattern: What once was trendy became first a stereotype, then a punch line. As Fast Company put it, “What if Miramax, but also Supreme?”.
Earlier this year, A24 fandom entered its next phase: the era of the loyalty program. Spring heralded the arrival of A24 All Access, or AAA24 for short. For $5 a month, A24 superfans can receive the studio’s in-house zine, exclusive tickets to its digital screening room, first dibs on limited-edition merch, and, best of all, an induction into A24’s “close friends” list on Instagram. Few of these benefits have anything to do with the actual films, though the studio has promised that more will be revealed.
Is this the beginning of the end, the moment the A24 fan becomes the next Disney adult but with sleeve tattoos? Or perhaps it is merely a reflection of something we’ve known since the studio’s very first hit—that there’s no more powerful imperative than “Look at my shit.”