Your most annoying friend wants to go to the movies again and you already know what they want to see: an A24 Film. They’re seen as the independent film company, making less generic films with pretty images. A24 hasn’t been around for that long, founded only in 2012, but maybe they’ve earned this special reputation with 2017’s Best Picture success of Moonlight, and their reputation was further cemented with the 2023 Best Picture win of Everything Everywhere All at Once. In both cases, the fame directed toward A24 overlooks the artists who created the film and the film itself, even if A24 helped make it popular. Fans are not looking to see a film but rather to see the label put in front of it because it has greater value as a status symbol they can tell their friends about. In this sense, A24 fandom is a false and ignorantly elitist substitute for Marvel enthusiasts, which many A24 fans claim to hate most. 

A24 is given too much credit for the films they produce and distribute. What their devoted followers have bought into is only a calculated marketing strategy. Last year, A24 announced their intentions to make more commercial films and “would move away from making as many [dramas].” This was not something to worry about in the distant future, as going to the movies this year confirms that this pivot has quickly been implemented. It’s why a film like Civil War, an A24 film released earlier this Spring, has a sense of prestige attached to it, despite its commitment to numbing the audience to fascism. Here the intentions of a change in what A24 produces becomes clear: make big-budget commercial films that are unique only because they keep the earlier achieved reputation for intimacy.

Another recent example of A24’s shift is John Crowley’s We Live in Time, which you can still see at the Belcourt. The film is a romantic dramedy starring Florence Pugh and a cookie-cutter performance from Andrew Garfield. We Live in Time tries to stand apart from your typical rom-com with a non-linear structure, but its simple story dulls any chance of unconventionality as every bit of drama is forced into existence. 

Crowley’s film is most interesting for its setting, taking place somewhere in Great Britain and spanning a few years approximately between 2019 and June 2023. During this time, our stars meet and fall in love, and Florence Pugh’s character is diagnosed with cancer. We experience the highs and lows of their relationship along with the excitement of them having a daughter. 

However, we know hardly anything about them as people. It seems like an intentionally obtuse question, but where is covid? Furthermore, do they care about the queen dying? Does Brexit affect the European cooking competition in which Florence Pugh participates? Did they watch England lose in the European finals in soccer? Did they care about Russia invading Ukraine? We gain no sense of them because they do not seem to exist in a world where politics or current events happen. We can safely assume that life is constantly changing around them, except for themselves who wish to never be culturally or politically impacted. The film’s purpose is to disregard the world to make reality seem better than it is. It is easier to escape into the vacuum with Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield because there is nothing except their own worries; they are the only people who matter. As a result, we can project ourselves onto the characters because there is nothing specific enough to make them human, and can be anything we desire.

This is the A24 of the future: commercial releases that excite and comfort us and help us to forget reality. It sounds a lot like what many think of the MCU and the overabundance of superhero movies. 

A24 gave We Live in Time a wide release and is doing well at the box office, bringing in almost $12 million domestically as of writing. There’s generally no telling what films A24 distributes will earn a wide release, but they frequently botch releases of riskier films, showing them on only a few screens. 2022’s The Eternal Daughter directed by Joanna Hogg and Stars at Noon directed by Claire Denis were given extremely unceremonial releases, almost straight to streaming, and have both never been screened in a theater in the state of Tennessee; they are also two of our greatest living filmmakers. An A24 executive would claim that these films are not as appealing to audiences and would only lose them money, but how can companies like A24 expect audiences to ever be interested in these movies if they can’t see them in the first place? Why even produce them? Because A24 can still take credit for these films, now forever members of their catalog, to help give their more important releases the image they seek.

There may of course be unmissable films in the future that still bear the A24 label. International Lens has a preview screening of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl on Thursday, November 14, but A24 has already delayed the film’s release from December 2024 to an unknown time next year, so it is not difficult to wonder if it becomes another ignored release from them. They also have one of my most anticipated films of the year with Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, although every time a festival film announces it will be distributed by A24, chances of seeing it in a theater not in New York City or Los Angeles greatly decreases.

A24 never deserved the prestige it has, despite it occasionally being involved in the production of great films. There is no such thing as an A24 film. There is, however, a Greta Gerwig film, a Berry Jenkins film, a Yorgos Lanthrimos film, a Paul Schrader film, a Kelly Reichardt film, a Claire Denis film, and so many other brilliant auteurs and their crews who are much more than the three characters that shine for a moment on screen.