Slate Declares A24 the Coolest Studio in Hollywood

Earlier this year I was drinking in a hotel bar with the head of another distribution company at a film festival. I asked him what he wants his company to be. “I want to be A24,” he said. “Everybody wants to be A24. God bless ’em.” If theaters are to remain something more than a repository for superhero movies, everybody might have to be." 

Just when we thought Megan Ellison was the coolest producer in Hollywood, Slate goes and publishes this long form piece about A24. The two retro, VHS-y logos seemed so similar we weren't entirely certain they were separate entities. Now we know.

Slate doesn't just declare A24 cool and zeigeisty, they predict that they will be the saviors of artistic integrity in Hollywood.

When historians of the future try to pinpoint the precise moment that the film industry crawled out of its deathbed and back onto its feet, there’s a good chance they’ll land somewhere in March 2013, when a fledgling distribution company called A24 Films transformed a Harmony Korine movie starring a cornrowed James Franco into a genuine cultural event.

Indeed, they have managed to distribute with extremely successful results some of the best (by best we mean most innovative and interesting) movies of the past several years, including Spring Breakers, Locke, The End of the Tour, Under the Skin, Slow West and Ex Machina [full list]. Slate asserts that A24's success has a lot to do with their creative marketing strategy, one that eschews the idea that indie films should be marketed as such.

But A24, it became clear when I spoke to the company’s employees, saw Spring Breakers as a Trojan horse for progressive cinema... As Korine told Rolling Stone: “I want to do the most radical work, but put it out in the most commercial way.” A24 just took him up on it.

Slate does worry, however, that A24 might lose its glossy cool kid sheen because of its new $40 million partnership with DirecTV.

But as A24 initiates the second phase of its existence, a transition that includes financing its own films and branching out into television, the company’s exponential growth may find it becoming part of the problem it had once seemed destined to solve. When your business model is predicated on treating each movie like an event, how do you get bigger without changing who you are?

But Slate assuages that worry with excitement by A24's rockstar upcoming slate. For one, they are distributing the TIFF hit Room. We interviewed one of the stars of Room, Cas Anvar, which you can check out here.

Even more excited is Slate about The Witch, which the writer thinks is one of the masterpieces of our time. Indeed, when we watch the trailer, we're pretty excited too.