A24 Meets A.I.
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A24 rose from “small budget indie movie studio” to “one of the most respected brands in cinema” on a reputation for treating filmmakers like auteurs. But as the studio is growing and exploring how to integrate artificial intelligence, it’s at odds with some of the very directors who helped A24 establish itself.
Guest: Alex Barasch, culture editor at the New Yorker
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Transcript
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| 0:56.8 | Things people love. T's and Cs apply, exclusive vehicles. |
| 1:05.7 | I got a call into the office about a disturbance. |
| 1:09.3 | On July 18th, the film studio A-24 released director Ari Aster's Eddington. |
| 1:15.8 | Marketed as a sort of black comedy western, Eddington is about a small community in New Mexico during May 2020. |
| 1:23.6 | So a COVID-19 movie, basically. |
| 1:27.0 | Well, here's a quote from you, arm yourselves. |
| 1:29.2 | I don't mean literal arms. |
| 1:32.8 | But it was a big COVID movie with a stacked cast that included Emma Stone, |
| 1:39.6 | Pedro Pascal, and Austin Butler. |
| 1:42.2 | The reported budget was $25 million, which, granted, isn't Marvel |
| 1:48.0 | money, but it was a huge step up from a studio that typically released low-budget indie films, |
| 1:55.3 | like, for example, Astor's previous films, Hereditary and Midsamar, both of which were made for $10 million or less. |
| 2:02.9 | I mean, if you look back to the beginnings of A24, most of their films were way, way, |
| 2:08.2 | more in scale. |
| 2:09.0 | You know, they were picking up things that other distributors in studios had dropped. |
| 2:12.5 | So it is a significant scaling up relative to that kind of earlier era of A24, and is representative, I think, |
| 2:18.7 | of where they're headed as a studio. |
| 2:20.9 | That's Alex Barish, a culture editor at The New Yorker, and he writes about the entertainment |
... |
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