A24’s Film-World Domination
By: Divija Agarwal
Edited by: Angelina Gaol
“The goal is that everything in a movie has meaning. Nothing is just there because it’s there. We wanted every image to have integrity, so that it didn’t feel adorned, but that it felt placed.”
Greta Gerwig, director of A24’s Lady Bird
A24 – if you’re not familiar with the name, you’ve definitely heard of the company’s work; they’re the masterminds behind “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, Gerwig’s “Lady Bird”, HBO’s “Euphoria”, and the 2017 Oscars’ Best Picture winner, “Moonlight”. A24 is changing Hollywood as we speak – successfully appealing to incredibly diverse audiences, despite their unconventional approaches. So, what sets them apart from other companies in today’s world of film?
A24 was founded in New York just over 10 years ago, by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel and John Hodges. While it started off as a distribution company, it soon after evolved to producing films, too, with the hopes of a new era where certain things in the industry are done differently. In 2013, A24 released their first movie, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Director Ari Aster has shared that A24 is not looking for “prestige films” that are chasing after the Oscars but is seeking films that draw attention to the “people with a voice.”
FOUNDING
SOCIETAL THEMES
As expressed in Gerwig’s quote above and an ideal that lies as the fundamental basis of A24’s founding, the company ensures that its films are not only visually appealing, but also discuss relevant societal thematic events. Most particularly, A24 specifically produces a variety of coming-of-age films, such as The Florida Project and Moonlight, to deliberately feature and bring light upon those with unique and compelling voices that so commendably deserve to be heard.
A24 also priortizes in highlighting the importance of the long running themes of hardship and endurance by utilizing the coming of age genre to focus on the childlike lenses of wonder that brings about a sense of nostalgia and a remininscense of lacking responsibilities that arises within the viewers. For instance, Moonlight is inspired by real-life events that are combined with astonishing cinematography and dramatized story-telling to intensify the underlying theme of endurance by discussing difficult subjects such asidentity, sexuality, masculinity, and race.
GROUNDBREAKING REPRESENTATION
In accordance with the themes discussed, A24 also addresses a wide range of necessary and realistic representations, in which has highly contributed to their success amongst other established rival companies. As you’ve probably heard, Everything Everywhere All At Once, written about in a previous InSightScoop issue, received the Academy Award for best film, becoming a monumental event for the Asian community in terms of its expressive representation. Reception of awards for indie film companies especially allows for their integration into the Hollywood world, heightening the positive impact of indie film character portrayals. Namely, with Lady Bird addressing complex mother-daughter relationships as a non-arguably, modern feminist film and Moonlight depicting the struggles Black Americans go through by featuring an all-Black cast, A24 has successfully gone through lengths to break stereotypical ways of storytelling and incorporated a new improved creative strategy to produce films that tell these sympathetic stories, when the other film companies would most likely be too afraid to produce. Released in the past year, Netflix’s Beef is an artistic series that according to the Seattle Times “drives the Asian American model minority myth off a cliff.” It exquisitely conveys the realistic authenticity of Asian norms by portraying flawed characters and a wide range of socio-economic and ethnic groups within an Asian American context, which usually is not always executed well in Hollywood.
EFFECTIVELY USING LOW BUDGETS; KEY FOR INDIE FILM-MAKING
Everything Everywhere All At Once – a wildly popular film that has been heavily rewarded and talked about oftenly in the past few months – was estimated to be worth around 14.3 million USD, according to the New York Times, in production costs, yet managed to actually gross more than 140 million USD. Despite the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Everything Everywhere All At Once both being superhero-based films, the latter used far less CGI resources.
While emphasizing on their intended 80’s aesthetic combined with contemporary graphics, most of the visual effects were actually created by a small team of six artists, with limited resources. The artist, Zac Stoltz, who led the team said that “[they] ended up using CG very sparingly for a couple reasons - The motto was less Marvel, more ‘Ghostbusters.’” Using their limited budget and referring to the 80s’ works like ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, they managed to limit their budget, but still use independent creators to revolutionize their personal realm of superhero films.
Similarly, Lady Bird grossed around 80 million USD with a 10 million USD budget, and Moonlight’s search for rising talent and a very minimal 4 million USD budget accumulated over 65 million USD in profits.
While high budgets and expensive CGI are signature traits of Marvel films, even their lowest budgets for films such as Ant-Man were estimated to have a budget of around $130 million as a result. And hence, while this isn’t a comparison between two very different companies’ work, it’s undeniable that A24’s innovation sets them apart from other big Hollywood filmmakers at the moment – providing authenticity and proving that a big budget isn’t what leads to success.
Instead of using a more traditional route for marketing, the company spends ‘roughly 95%’ of its marketing money online as reported by the NYT, relying on social media for their promotions. This looks like them creating a ‘Dungeons and Dragons’- inspired board game to campaign Dev Patel’s The Green Knight, and also have a range of ‘notes’ – interviews and podcasts – with certain writers and creators on their website. Along with their alternative paths in actual filmmaking, marketing also sets them up for a broad but necessarily low-budget audience, as an indie film company that doesn’t have the same setup as the decades-old Warner Brothers, for example.
INDEPENDENT CREATORS’ NEW-FOUND PLATFORM
Independent writers are given a platform in A24’s world. They support independent cinema by providing them the opportunity to put their work into the world. This includes people like Robert Eggers, The Daniels, Ari Aster, and Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird being Gerwig’s first time as a director, too. This inclusion of independent directors, writers and filmmakers also contributes to unique films that otherwise would not be approached by bigger and more conventional companies to be created.
Ari Aster’s Midsommar uses an unconventional daytime setting, which isn’t seen very often in mainstream films as your typical, dark night-time eerie setting. Aster was able to use his unique qualities as a director to generate a specific feeling of unfamiliarity, strangeness and intrusion into the ‘safe space’ that light can usually provide. In terms of filming techniques, Eggers’ Lighthouse was captured on Kodak B&W 35mm film – which is only usually used in a handful of films each year where most companies and creators would opt for a traditional crew of digital cameras. Despite its unconventionality, the film was presented at the 2019 Cannes Festival, and went on to win the FIPRESCI Prize for its creation of a distinct visual signature.
By including independents, handling their resources, and addressing quintessential societal values, A24 continues to use a lack of rigidity to innovate and create a consistent portfolio of hit films. A24 is a catalyst for change in the world of Hollywood.