I got a call into the office about a disturbance.

On July 18th, the film studio A24 released director Ari Aster's Eddington.

Marketed as a sort of black comedy western, Eddington is about a small community in New Mexico during May 2020.

So a COVID-19 movie, basically.

Well, here's a quote from you, arm yourselves.

I don't mean literal arms.

But it was a big COVID movie with a stacked cast that included Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, and

Austin Butler. The reported budget was $25 million, which, granted, isn't Marvel money, but it was a huge

step up from a studio that typically released low-budget indie films, like, for example,

Aster's previous films, Hereditary and Midsamar, both of which were made for $10 million or less.

I mean, if you look back to the beginnings of A24, most of their films were way, ways more in scale.

You know, they were picking up things that other distributors in studios had dropped.

So it is a significant scaling up

relative to that kind of earlier era of A24,

and is representative, I think,

of where they're headed as a studio.

That's Alex Barish,

a culture editor at The New Yorker,

and he writes about the entertainment industry.

A24 set out to disrupt Hollywood, and part of that was being a place where talent wanted to work.

They have a kind of echelon of autos that they work with over and over again, and the promise that they make to these people,

I spoke to dozens of directors for this piece, is really that they will get

...