A24's four-point plan for indie-film domination

14:21How A24 became a Hollywood powerhouse

What do the folk-horror hit Midsommar, the coming-of-age drama Moonlight, the Adam Sandler nailbiter Uncut Gems, and this year's over-the-top Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once have in common? The answer can be found in the opening seconds of each film. Since the company's formation in 2012, the A24 Films logo has become a true seal of quality among cinephiles, an instant indicator that you're about to see something bold, unique, and probably a little weird. (In addition to the aforementioned titles, A24 has also brought us the eternally creepy likes of Hereditary and The Witch, bizarro WTF features like Swiss Army Man, as well as gritty, zeitgeist-seizing TV shows like Euphoria and our current binge-watch of choice, BEEF.)

But with A24, the fandom goes beyond what's on screen. Harnessing the power of both internet meme culture and a stylish old-school logo that looks great on hoodies, beach towels, and all manner of doodads, A24 has developed the sort of cult following normally reserved for cool character actors or eccentric auteurs. With A24 set to release Beau Is Afraid, its most expensive — and quite possibly most bizarre — film to date this Friday, Vulture critic Nate Jones and Mashable film editor Kristy Puchko joined host Elamin Abdelmahmood to explore how this indie distribution company racked up 16 Oscar wins in about 10 years. Here were the four biggest takeaways:

1. All hail the anti-moguls

From Louis B. Mayer to Harvey Weinsten in the '90s, Hollywood has historically produced movie-studio moguls as big and notorious as the stars on the screen. But the founders of A24 — financier Daniel Katz and indie-film executives David Fenkel and John Hodges — have deliberately steered clear of the spotlight, rarely granting interviews to press. Whether it's a savvy mythmaking tactic or a sign of genuine humility, Puchko believes the strategy has served A24 very well.

"As we've seen with Weinstein, having a poster-child/mogul can make something fallible. You even see this with Blumhouse [Productions] — when Jason Blum says something not-great, everyone kind of quivers about Blumhouse. Them [Katz, Fenkel, and Hodges] not being the identity of A24 allows the filmmakers to be the identity. So like right now, with Beau Is Afraid, [director] Ari Aster is the big star we're talking about. And before that, with Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Whale, we weren't talking about whatever A24's version of Harvey Weinstein was saying about awards season, we were talking about the narratives of these movies, and what the Daniels brought as writers and directors, and what Michelle Yeoh did with this performance that she had been waiting her whole career to do, and what Brendan Fraser's comeback means."

2. Eclectic style, consistent sensibility

While certain film companies — say, Troma or Studio Ghibli — have built cult fan bases around a specific genre or aesthetic, A24's offerings are all over the map: creepy horror films, surreal sci-fi, gonzo comedies, low-key dramas. But Jones sees a common sensibility that connects A24's oeuvre. "They give their directors almost total creative freedom," he says, "and so you see things in an A24 movie that maybe would have gotten sanded out of a movie that was released by another studio. Before Everything Everywhere All at Once, [writer/director duo] Daniels made a first feature called Swiss Army Man, where Paul Dano plays a castaway on a desert island who encounters a corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe. And he sort of uses the corpse as an all-purpose tool and friend. The corpse's farts allow it to be turned into a jetski. The corpse's penis turns into a compass — there's all sorts of very weird things happening. And you can just imagine any other studio watching this and being like, 'Oh my god — what are we going to do with this?' But A24 watches this and thinks, 'Oh my gosh, there's so many things we can do with this! We have Harry Potter playing a farting corpse? That's gold for us!'"

WATCH | Official trailer for Swiss Army Man:

3. Memes and merch: this is how they win

As Jones notes, founding a film company that puts complete creative control into the hands of its directors can be very risky from a financial standpoint. A24's response was to rally a fanbase that could do its marketing for them. "They were going to save money by not marketing their films the traditional way with expensive billboards or trailers or Superbowl ads. They were going to use the internet and try to make their films viral sensations in the hopes that it would give them some free advertising."

Anyone who's been on the internet since 2019 has no doubt encountered that image of a sunglasses-clad Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems accompanied by his most famous line from the film: 'This is how I win.' It's just one of an infinite array of memes that have helped give A24 films a visibility that no ad campaign could buy. And thanks to A24's robust merch site — featuring everything from Uncut Gems basketballs to jigsaw puzzles of Charlie from Hereditary's smashed face — many fans will gladly fork over hundreds of dollars to serve as IRL brand ambassadors. "A24 acts like an indie record company," Puchko says, "where if you know this band, you're in this club. So wearing a pin of Toni Collette's face from Hereditary or using the 'this is how I win meme' are all ways to communicate: 'I'm part of this club.' It's a very film-nerd thing to do."

4. There truly is no such thing as bad publicity

With its three-hour runtime and chaotic, hallucinator structure, Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid is not a logical candidate to follow Everything Everywhere All at Once to the Oscar podium. As Puchko notes, audiences at preview screenings in New York and L.A. were sharply divided between those who thought it was brilliant and those who thought it was trash. But for a company like A24, it doesn't really matter what people are saying, so long as they're talking.

"A24 creates a sense of urgency that independent cinema doesn't tend to get very often," she says. "Like, a Marvel movie will come out and you don't just want to see it — you want to see it opening weekend so that you don't get spoilers and you can enjoy that film under the best possible circumstances. And what A24 does is create that same sense of urgency, where you think, 'Well, I don't want to hear what other people have to say about Beau Is Afraid. I want to decide for myself: is this genius, or is it trash?' And that urgency is really a very smart way to advertise something that is their most expensive film to date, and that is going to be polarizing, because it's not a movie that plays by any of the rules we are accustomed to movies playing by."

WATCH | Official trailer for Beau Is Afraid:

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.