A24 made headlines at this year’s Oscars with Everything Everywhere All At Once, with the indie studio onboard as its distributor, winning Best Picture. While starting as a distributor of indie films A24 slowly moved to producing them in 2016 with another Best Picture Academy Award winner, Moonlight. Movie Tracker reveals how much A24 has continued to both produce and distribute since 2018.
While their distribution arm sells much of A24’s produced slate, there are exceptions. 2019’s ‘Native Son’ was their first home production to be sold to a third party distributor (Warner in this case), which turned out to be the best course of action as the movie did not receive the positive word of mouth or critical acclaim typically associated with their movies (it was intended for a theatrical release at the start of production). Another example is the 2019 movie ‘Uncut Gems’, which at the time was their most expensive production ($19 million) and had two relatively inexperienced directors at the helm. A24 therefore sold the international rights of the movie to Netflix and gave the film a wide theatrical release in the US. It in fact became their highest grossing movie domestically thanks to very positive word of mouth and widespread critical acclaim.
Although A24 are producing more movies every year, they're mainly a distribution business at heart as these relationships with other third-party Pay-TV / Streaming services to mitigate risks has been a strategy that they’ve followed since their early days. One of their earliest partnerships was with DirecTV in the US, where A24 distributed movies had a 30-day-window on DirecTV before their theatrical release.
Although this deal would have limited the theatrical potential of some of their titles, it served as a great way to market more niche movies and themselves as the brand behind such unique creations. Another one of their earliest deals was with Amazon Prime, which became the exclusive home form any popular A24 titles until 2016, after which they slowly started rolling over some of their titles from Amazon Prime to Netflix. This has been a continuing trend for the past decade as they have shown the willingness to work with multiple buyers in order to make the best profit out of their titles instead of exclusively depending on one service to be their home.
Even their deal with Apple TV+ is unorthodox as no other distributor pushing for theatrical releases of indie films would agree to produce films to be exclusively premiered on a service but if not for deals like this, movies like ‘Causeway’ and ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ (both films received a limited theatrical run) would not have been able to reach the global audience they did. All while mitigating the risks associated with wide scale distribution of such films.
A24 recognises that the best way that their films would gain recognition and financial success is through selling to multiple buyers but looking at their sales from the past few years it is obvious that they have an affinity to selling their content to Global SVOD services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV+.
They have also planned to increase their spend on television pilots with the hope of bringing the unique A24 approach of artistic storytelling to TV, with Show Tracker revealing their collaborations with the likes of Netflix, HBO and others to produce critically acclaimed and award winning shows such as ‘Euphoria’, ‘Ramy’, ‘Beef’ and ‘Irma Vep’.
A24’s focus on creating a niche brand full of brand new intellectual property that people gravitate towards, while protecting their film makers’ visions is an admirable position on the creative side. What enables this on the business side is their unique approach to distribution and their ability to make a return on investment for the smallest of projects, to ensure that the trust they choose to put on film makers will continue to bring them success critically and commercially.
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