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Indie Hollywood darling A24 scored a massive financial hit with its “Backrooms” horror flick this year, netting over $330 million globally on a minuscule $10 million budget — the studio’s highest-grossing film of all time.
The movie’s director Kane Parsons, a 21-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, is an outspoken critic of AI, calling it “genuinely harmful” to creativity.
“We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop,” he told Deadline earlier this month. “That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”
Then, a revelation so shocking it was fit for an A24 feature: last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was investing $75 million in A24 as part of a research partnership with the goal of creating new AI tools for movie production — a bombshell development that had fans in a full-on meltdown.
The reaction shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The use of generative AI in the entertainment industry has been a lightning rod, with high-profile creatives, including Parsons, loudly voicing their opposition to the tech. A concurrent public AI backlash has turned fans into an angry mob — and it’s clear that A24 wasn’t prepared for the sustained backlash.
“Maybe we just have to accept that the A24 era is over,” reads a widely circulating post on the A24 subreddit. “Indie studios come and go. Like Miramax and New Line Cinema before them, A24 was always destined to be consumed by corporate interest.”
“I don’t know that this Google partnership will necessarily be the death of the studio, but if it is something else will replace it,” the author wrote.
Meanwhile, A24 has been trying to pick up the pieces as its most loyal fans lead a revolt online.
“This is a research partnership,” communications head Sophia Shin told Wired. “We’re working side-by-side with DeepMind’s researchers to learn, iterate, and build, having an active hand in shaping new tools and workflows.”
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