Founded in 2012. Forty films later, A24 had won Best Picture twice. How an upstart distributor became the most-watched brand in American independent cinema.
A24 was founded in August 2012 by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges. The three had worked at major distributors — Oscilloscope, Big Beach — and the company was set up as a film acquisition and distribution operation rather than a production studio. They named it after the Italian highway, the A24 autostrada from Rome to Teramo.
Twelve years later, A24 has won Best Picture twice (Moonlight 2016, Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022) and become the most-recognised brand in American independent cinema — to the point that 'an A24 movie' is now a genre signifier the way 'a Miramax film' was in the 1990s.
This essay traces how that happened.
A24's first three releases — A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, Spring Breakers, and The Bling Ring — were all acquisitions. The company didn't produce films in its first phase; it acquired completed or in-progress films at festivals and distributed them in the United States.
Spring Breakers (March 2013) was the first commercial success: a Harmony Korine film starring Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and James Franco that grossed $32m on a $5m budget. The film was unconventionally marketed — bikinis, neon, James Franco's cornrows — and established A24's instinct for cultural-moment positioning.
The 2014 release of Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer) was a critical landmark. The 2015 release of Ex Machina demonstrated that the company could profitably distribute genre cinema with art-house ambitions.
Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016) was A24's first Best Picture nomination — and the first Best Picture winner for the company. The famous Oscar ceremony in which La La Land was incorrectly announced and then corrected to Moonlight was, also, the moment A24 became a name the general public knew.
Moonlight had been acquired by A24 at the Telluride Film Festival earlier that year for under $1m. The film grossed $65m worldwide. The economics of independent distribution had not seen a year-to-year return like that in over a decade.
The 2017 ceremony also saw A24 release Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig), Florida Project (Sean Baker), and Disaster Artist. The company was, by the end of 2017, the most-talked-about distributor in American cinema.
A24's most-discussed sub-brand is its 'elevated horror' line — films marketed as art-house thrillers that work in horror conventions. The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2016), Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), and Midsommar (Aster, 2019) are the canonical examples. All three were directorial debuts or early features. All three found their audiences through word of mouth in art-house cinemas and then expanded.
What A24 understood that the major studios did not, in 2016: there was an underserved audience for serious horror cinema. The post-Get Out market wanted horror as a category for thematic ambition, not just for jump scares. A24's marketing — minimal stills, oblique posters, refusal to over-explain in trailers — treated the audience as intelligent. Most studio horror marketing assumes the opposite.
The downside: the term 'elevated horror' has been criticised by horror fans and directors as condescending toward the broader genre. Jordan Peele has rejected it. Mike Flanagan has rejected it. The implication that some horror is elevated and the rest isn't has stopped sitting well even with the directors A24 has championed.
A24 began producing films in earnest from around 2018. The shift from acquisition-and-distribution to in-house production was a strategic move: by financing earlier in the production cycle, A24 could secure better release-window economics and build a library of owned IP.
The films of this phase include Uncut Gems (the Safdie brothers, 2019), Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022), The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022), Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023), Talk to Me (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2022), and Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024).
Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most commercially successful film in A24's history. It grossed $145m on a $25m budget and won seven Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), and Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis). It is also the first Best Picture winner in the multiverse-comedy category, which had not previously existed.
A24's distinctive contribution to film distribution may turn out to be its consistent branding work. The company has built a merchandise operation (t-shirts, posters, screenplay books), a print magazine (A24, launched 2014, irregular release), and a podcast network. Most film distributors do not do any of this.
The strategy works because it builds a relationship with the audience that is not film-specific. An A24 fan is not just someone who happened to see Lady Bird; they're someone who will trust A24's next release. This is the same model that built Apple's customer loyalty, applied to film distribution.
The counter-criticism is that A24 has cultivated a recognisable aesthetic — slow pace, ambient sound, restrained colour palettes, semi-naturalistic acting — that has become its own house style. Some critics have argued the company's output has narrowed creatively over time, with directors knowingly making 'A24 films' rather than the films they would otherwise make. The criticism is fair to some extent; the company's defenders point out that any visible house style is a function of consistent quality control.
A24's impact on American independent cinema in the 2020s is comparable to Miramax's impact in the 1990s. Both companies demonstrated that a serious distributor with editorial taste and marketing intelligence could change which films Americans saw — and which directors could afford to make second and third features.
The economics of the 2020s are worse than the 1990s. Theatrical attendance has not recovered to 2019 levels. Mid-budget adult drama is mostly produced for streaming. The fact that A24 has continued releasing 18-25 films a year in cinemas, profitably, is genuinely unusual.
The company's future will be determined, partly, by whether it can sustain its current pace and partly by whether it gets acquired. There have been rumours since 2023; nothing has happened. As of 2026, A24 remains the most-watched independent studio in the United States.