Don’t Like - A24 As Lifestyle Brand

Film seems to be in a weird place these days. The big studios don’t seem to make anything that has much by way of artistic merit while super hero movies have taken on mythic levels of box office success. Some films now make a deliberate point of being theatre only releases due to the ubiquity of streaming. More and more old(er) films are being remade or franchised out of fear of making something new, which is exactly what helped those films be successful when they came out. Also, dead people can narrate films thanks to artificial intelligence. It’s a weird moment. While it isn’t alone in the history of film for being weird, it does have a certain uniqueness to it that is indelibly a result of the logic of our times. One such oddity that truly drives me nuts is the advent of A24 as a lifestyle brand. It is true that studios and production companies have created loyal fanbases in the past, and those fanbases have collected their merch long before A24 ever existed. But, A24 has manifested this in a way that is distinctly a result of our algorithmically influenced lives. They are a movie studio wrapped in a streetwear brand inside pinterest mood for people who pine about the “authenticity” of skateboarding and 90s rave culture without have skated or ever going to raves. An A24 release today would be most at home in a natural wine bar where people are there principally there to be seen as opposed watching the movie or even tasting the wine. A24 seems to exist more in the aesthetic mind space of the modern art fair book than as a place for serious filmic expression, despite having some very good films in their catalogue. This can even been in the very filmic quality of some of their release which seem to have VSCO-style filter augmenting the frames to create a cohesive lifestyle aesthetic much in the way influencers use filters on Instagram. Maybe I’m paranoid but this feels like a logical result of brand building mind rot that places the primacy of being loyal to the brand of all else, as though the brand of a studio was what mattered when watching a film. This is even why people wear A24 gear around. The gear acts as a signifier to like minded people that they’re in on the same thing without having to have talk about that or better have a genuine discussion about film. It’s become shorthand for being a member of a certain segment of the professional creative class that would call oneself a creator. A creator of what? Well, brands. After all, what else does anyone want to create?