The Idea
In 2012, Daniel Katz was driving the A24 autostrada into Rome when he had the moment of clarity that would name a company. Katz had spent years inside the machinery of the film business, running the film finance group at Guggenheim Partners and learning exactly how modern movies got paid for. He had always wanted to go out on his own. He had always been a little afraid to. Somewhere on the motorway between Teramo and Rome, the fear lost.
He pulled in two collaborators: David Fenkel, co-founder and president of indie distributor Oscilloscope, and John Hodges, head of production at Big Beach. The three saw the same gap. The bold, director-led independent cinema of the 1990s had quietly disappeared, and the major studios had grown too risk-averse to bring it back. There was room for a company built on taste rather than formula, one that put the films and the filmmakers first and itself nowhere. This was the beginning of A24.
The Execution
- August 2012: Katz, Fenkel and Hodges launched A24, with seed money from Guggenheim Partners, named after the Italian motorway where Katz decided to take the leap.
- 2013: The first theatrical release, Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, flopped (16% on Rotten Tomatoes, Charlie Sheen skipped the premiere). The breakout came months later with Spring Breakers, a film that tested so badly Fenkel said they broke records for how badly it scored.
- 2015: A24 moved from distributing films to making them, and Alex Garland's Ex Machina won the studio its first Academy Award, for visual effects.
- 2017: Moonlight won Best Picture, A24's first, taking three Oscars from eight nominations and turning a scrappy distributor into a brand.
- 2018: Ari Aster's Hereditary became the studio's highest-grossing film at roughly $81m, A24 signed a multi-year film deal with Apple, and co-founder John Hodges left.
- 2021: With Apple and Amazon circling, A24 explored a sale at between $2.5bn and $3bn.
- Early 2022: It chose not to sell, raising $225m at a $2.5bn valuation instead.
- 2023: Everything Everywhere All at Once swept seven Oscars including Best Picture, the high-water mark of A24's awards run.
- June 2024: A $250m round led by Thrive Capital valued A24 at $3.5bn, up 40% in two years, with founders and employees still holding the majority and outside investors on around 12.5%.
- June 2026: Google's DeepMind took a roughly $75m stake, its first ever in a film studio, as part of an AI tools partnership, with A24's revenue having more than doubled in two years.
The lesson?
The lesson? A24 never had the biggest budget or the deepest library. It had taste, and it worked out early that taste could be a distribution strategy. Roughly 95% of its marketing went into internet culture rather than billboards, and every release became something fans wanted to belong to. The films were the product. The brand was the moat. When Apple and Amazon came circling, A24 raised instead of selling, because the thing they wanted couldn't be bought off the shelf. Everyone else was selling films. A24 was building a brand, and that's what Google just paid to sit next to.