In November of 2015, the upstart film studio A24 had a problem. Executives had acquired the writer-director Robert Eggers’s stark, unsettling début, “The Witch,” at the Sundance Film Festival and wanted to make it their first release to open on thousands of screens. But both Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred as a teen-ager tempted by unholy forces, were then unknown. The story, set in the sixteen-thirties and scripted in Early Modern English, was a tough sell. To generate buzz, the company sought an unlikely partner: the Satanic Temple.
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A24’s marketing team had noticed that the organization, which mounts protests in support of religious freedom and reproductive rights, had a knack for headline-grabbing stunts. They reached out to Jex Blackmore, the Temple’s spokesperson at the time, who agreed to a meeting after watching “The Witch” and finding it “pretty disturbing, in a wonderful way.” The studio flew Blackmore from Detroit to Manhattan to talk with executives, among them David Fenkel, one of A24’s founders, who proved surprisingly receptive to ideas about the “philosophy behind satanism and witchcraft.”
The Satanic Temple publicly endorsed the movie—a first for the order—and A24 bankrolled “interactive performances” to follow preview screenings. Blackmore drew up a document enshrining their shared goal: “Create a narrative and controversy that transforms ‘The Witch’ into an iconic film.” The satanists planned the parties; A24 minded the guest list, and canvassed butchers in search of a pig’s head, for ritual use. At a post-screening event at the Jane Hotel, in New York, attendees had their foreheads marked with ash, then mingled with nearly nude performers, a theremin player, and a dominatrix. Blackmore said, “People watch a film, and then they expect to go to some Hollywood party. I wanted to really distort that experience.”
The alliance elicited plenty of press, and even some actual horror: one faith-based publication asked, “Should Christians Be Afraid of ‘The Witch’?” The film, which A24 acquired for $1.5 million, made upward of forty million at the box office. For Eggers, this was something of a devil’s bargain: when he tried to travel to Poland to scout his next feature, the country’s film commission barred him, convinced that he was a satanist. But the campaign—viral, edgy, and distinctly un-Hollywood—presaged A24’s future success. “They support big visions,” Blackmore said. “It’s not often that you find people who are well resourced and well connected and are willing to trust people to be really wild with their ideas.”
In the decade since “The Witch,” Blackmore’s praise has been echoed by filmmakers ranging from Barry Jenkins to Sofia Coppola. A24 has won twenty-one Oscars, for such films as “Moonlight,” “The Brutalist,” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Among fans, it has become synonymous with auteur-driven independent cinema; some think of it as an auteur unto itself. (Coppola told me that she knew the company had made it when she saw a man in the West Village walking his dog with an A24-branded leash.)
But the studio is in flux. After a recent infusion of venture-capital money and a $3.5-billion valuation, its production budgets and commercial ambitions have grown. It now has a music label and an Off Broadway theatre, and has just created a division, A24 Labs, to explore A.I. tools. Josh and Benny Safdie, who broke out with the two-million-dollar A24 drama “Good Time,” are each releasing around seventy-million-dollar projects with the studio later this year—one starring Timothée Chalamet, the other starring Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson. Alex Garland, a writer-director who first worked with A24 on “Ex Machina,” is developing an adaptation of the best-selling video game Elden Ring.
In Garland’s view, A24 is still far from a Hollywood-style studio. “I’ve been working in film for over twenty-five years, and I’ve crossed a pre-A24 and a post-A24 era,” he told me. When he was starting out in the industry, in the late nineties, he said, “the deal was you could have ideas, you could have ethical complexity, you could have things that were confronting to the viewer in one way or another, but you needed to smuggle them into the film.” At A24, he’d found, “I don’t have to smuggle ideas in. In fact, the ideas are things that we will freely discuss and try to exploit.”
As the company grows, it’s betting that such provocations can be a selling point. If a movie is incendiary, the marketing department tends to lean in. “They think like Andy Warhol a little bit. Like, what’s relevant right now?” Halina Reijn, who directed “Babygirl,” in which Nicole Kidman has an illicit dom-sub affair, said of A24. “They also teach you to think like that as a filmmaker.” She, like Garland, has been encouraged to pursue topical material that sparks debate. “You might say, ‘I just want to go to Cannes!’ But they say, ‘No—you want to be part of culture.’ ”
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