It started on a highway in Italy. Three guys driving toward Rome, somewhere on the A24 autostrada, made a decision that would eventually upend American independent cinema. That’s the origin story of A24 — and it’s one of the many details that author Aaron West spent two years tracking down for his new book, The A24 New Wave (published under the Cinema Journeys imprint).
West came on the Film Threat YouTube channel to talk about the book, and the conversation ranged from A24’s early misfires to its current $3.5 billion valuation to the surprisingly intimate guerrilla filmmaking that went into Under the Skin. If you’ve ever wondered why seeing that A24 logo at the front of a movie makes you sit up straighter in your seat, West has spent more time thinking about that question than almost anyone.
Reddit Mods and True Believers
West isn’t just an outside observer. He’s one of three moderators of the A24 subreddit — a community he describes as unusually compassionate and inclusive, skewing young and millennial, with a passion for representation that mirrors the studio’s own marketing emphasis.
“There is a cult,” West said. “And I mean that as a compliment.” He’s right that the word fits. A24 has a fan club with around 100,000 subscribers. It costs about $60 a year, comes with a welcome box, and puts out a quarterly zine. The most recent issue at the time of the interview was dedicated to Pillion. They sell merch that moves fast — West mentioned Marty Supreme merchandise flying off the shelves. This is not how most film studios operate. This is how bands operate.
Chris noted that he’ll watch any movie with an A24 logo, no questions asked, comparing it to the old Disney pull — that reflexive brand trust that makes you show up before you even know what you’re seeing. Very few studios have ever earned that.
Spring Breakers Saved Them
A24’s first film was A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, a Charlie Sheen vehicle released during the peak of Sheen’s very public unraveling. It did not go well. But then Spring Breakers came along and, as West puts it, rescued the company.
“Spring Breakers came along and, as West puts it, rescued the company.”
Harmony Korine is not what you’d call a typical A24 filmmaker by today’s standards — West described him as a “very, very weird dude” who tap dances around his house — but Spring Breakers put A24 on the map. For their signature style, though, West points to two films that premiered at TIFF around the same time: Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Enemy didn’t make a huge splash right away, but found its audience on streaming services. Under the Skin was critically beloved, flat-out weird, and — West noted — comes with a heads-up that Scarlett Johansson appears fully nude, which is not what most people expected from a sci-fi horror film about an alien predator driving around Scotland in a van.
The behind-the-scenes story on that film is remarkable. Glazer’s team built cameras from scratch because nothing small enough to hide in the van also produced usable footage. At any given moment, there were eight to twelve hidden cameras running. They shot what West estimates was something like 60,000 hours of footage, spent eight months editing it, then threw that cut out and started over.
Ari Aster and the Festival Circuit
West is currently finishing up his chapter on Ari Aster, who he considers the current face of A24 — whether you love him or not. He talked about the Sundance premiere of Hereditary, where audience members were having what he called “visceral physical responses.” Aster sat in those screenings and apparently loved every second of it. He was deliberately trying to make people uncomfortable. He succeeded.
Sundance and SXSW have been essential to A24’s pipeline. They find films at festivals, acquire them, and take calculated bets on the people who made them. The bet on Eva Victor after Sorry Baby — which A24 picked up for $8 million and made back only $3 million at the box office — is a good example of how they think. The box office number isn’t the point. The point is that they’ve invested in Victor as a filmmaker, and they expect to make that back on her next project. It’s closer to a record label signing a new artist than a traditional film distribution deal.
The Economics, Demystified
West’s book has a chapter he calls “Stream-omics” that delves into what he calls the “multipliers” — the reason A24’s financials look so different from those of a studio that lives and dies by opening weekend.
Their valuation has climbed from $2.5 billion in 2022 to $3.5 billion, a 40% increase backed by Thrive Capital. The revenue streams aren’t just box office: there’s streaming rights, physical media (they handle their own Blu-ray releases now, having split from Lionsgate), a fan club with six-figure membership, and merchandise that can move at premium prices. West says that, on a pure budget-to-box-office basis, A24 often looks like it’s breaking even or taking small losses. When you factor in everything else, they print money.
“It’s closer to a record label signing a new artist than a traditional film distribution deal.”
Typical budgets range from $1 million to $10 million. Warfare was reportedly around $25 million. Marty Supreme reached $70 million, a kind of number that raises eyebrows among fans who wonder whether A24 is wandering into territory that might dilute what makes them special. West takes that concern seriously. He thinks the bigger swing on Marty Supreme was a calculated risk, and not without some blowback — he noted that audiences got a little tired of the marketing by the time the film came out. The indie foundation will always be there, he argued, because no major studio is competing for the $1 to $5 million slot. That’s A24’s home turf.
What “A24” Actually Means Now
West pointed to something in the chat during the livestream that he seemed to agree with: A24 has become an adjective. When someone says they’re looking for something “very A24,” people know what that means. Weird. Auteur-driven. Not mainstream, but cool. Inclusive but uncompromising. It’s the same shorthand people once used for Sundance films in the nineties — and West thinks it’s no coincidence that Sundance has lost relevance at roughly the same time A24 has risen.
“A24 has become an adjective.”
In marketing, he credits their long-term social media strategy. A24 has been on Instagram since around 2012 and has built millions of followers organically over the years. You can’t manufacture that. Other companies have noticed — he mentioned Neon as one label influenced by A24’s approach — but the head start matters.
The Book, and What’s Next
The A24 New Wave covers A24’s formative years through approximately 2018-2019, with Midsommar as the last film discussed in depth. It’s about 500 pages and includes a mid-book interlude West calls “the awards year” — covering A24’s Oscar campaign strategy, which he describes as inheriting Miramax’s playbook without the Weinstein-era corruption. They’ve now won Best Picture twice: Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The book is now available digitally on Amazon Kindle, with a print edition coming very soon. Find it at cinemajourneys.com/a24book.
And the next project? West let it slip: a book about the Criterion Collection, currently slated for 2028. Given what he did with A24, that’s going to be a good one.
Aaron West appeared on the Film Threat YouTube channel. The book “The A24 New Wave” is available at cinemajourneys.com.
