Like a lot of people today who care passionately about movies, I love A24. I don’t love every movie they make or release. But I love, and certainly like, enough of them, and I recognize — and salute — the special place that this cutting-edge production and distribution company has carved out for itself in the movie world. In the 13 years it’s been around, A24 has forged an identity that makes it the successor to such game-changing independent-film monoliths as Miramax and Fox Searchlight — companies that had such a strong aesthetic, backed by a powerful track record of success, that they came to define much of what independent film is.
So when I say that “The Drama,” the quirky dark Robert Pattinson-Zendaya comedy of marital jitters that opened last weekend, is a movie that could crystallize a change of identity for A24, you might think: Really? Why?
Let me explain. A24 has always known how to create buzz around its movies, along with a certain aura of cool. So when “The Drama” made $14 million over the weekend, riding a wave of audience enthusiasm and a touch of controversy as well (was the movie, as The A.V. Club put it, guilty of “mishandling” Zendaya? Uh, no), it might have seemed like business as usual. The thing is, you had to listen to the chatter. Many people love “The Drama,” some hate it, and some, like me, lean positive with qualifications. But what everyone seemed to agree on was that “The Drama” is a movie that begs to be talked about, and what a lot of people have been saying is, “Wow, how amazing is it to have a movie you actually want to talk about.”
Talk, you may say, is cheap. In this case, however, the talkers are talking about more than just talk. They’re talking about getting high on the stimulation, the nourishment, the engagement that mainstream movies once provided and, for the most part, no longer do. That “The Drama” is a wedding story — in form, a skewed rom-com — is integral to the conversation. It’s not just that people are talking about the movie; it’s that they’re talking about their own lives. They come out going, What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Would you marry someone with the Zendaya character’s past? Or would it not matter all that much?
It reminds me of the conversations I kept hearing in connection with another A24 release, this one from 10 months ago: “Materialists,” also a kind of heady boutique rom-com, and one that also provoked conversations that were as much about people’s lives as they were about the movie. “Materialists,” like a more cinematically supple “Sex and the City,” touched on the intersection of love and money in the digital age, and it inspired an endless round of social-media and IRL chatfests, not to mention a thousand think pieces, about how our relationship to money, in these increasingly desperate and aspirational times, is changing our relationship to love.
“Materialists” was a impressive indie hit (it made $36 million domestic, $71 million internationally). I expect “The Drama” to surpass it a bit, but to land in the same ballpark. Over the years, A24 has had far bigger hits than these. Yet I think the point of relevance is that audiences were consumed with talking about both movies because they are love stories. And let’s be clear: Until now, that has not been a defining element in the A24 wheelhouse. But if you take “The Drama” and “Materialists” together, and observe the significant hole they fill in the current film marketplace (smart romances! that are original! and surprise you!), they spell out a bold new flavor of commercial taste that could become much bigger and more defining for A24.
In the 13 years of its existence, A24 has released almost exactly 200 films, and the majority of them have been characterized by a cool/outré/hipster factor that boasts a cachet of daring and bravado, and that invites the audience to have that cachet rub off on them. That danger-vibe aesthetic was there from A24’s very first hit, which was only the second film the company ever released: the sexed-up punk outlaw comedy “Spring Breakers.” And it has carried over to such movies as “The Bling Ring” and “Under the Skin” and “Ex Machina” and “Room” and “The Witch” and “Krisha” and “The Lobster” and “American Honey” and “The Disaster Artist” and “Zola” and “Queer” and “I Saw the TV Glow” and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Pillion” and the Ti West trilogy (“X” and “Pearl” and “MaXXXine”) and the films of Ari Aster (“Hereditary” and “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid” and “Eddington”) and the films of the Safdie brothers (“Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” and, with each brother going solo, “The Smashing Machine” and “Marty Supreme“).
Of course, if A24 were just the company of indie hipster vibes, they might be in danger of boxing themselves in. But A24 has also made and/or released, with great success, many films of more earnest and less overtly exhibitionistic artistic achievement, like “Lady Bird” and “Moonlight “and “The Zone of Interest” and “Minari” and “Eighth Grade” and “Past Lives” and “Locke” and “The Florida Project” and “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Aftersun” and “Sing Sing” and “Sorry, Baby.” And it’s not as if those two categories are so discrete from each other. The A24 art films have edge; the A24 edge films have art. The company always aims for the nexus of those two aesthetic poles.
They hit the nexus, and the jackpot, with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which was the apotheosis of what my former Variety colleague Peter Debruge wittily dubbed “bizart-house movies.” With “Everything Everywhere,” A24 owned the bizart house, and swept the Oscars, putting out a movie that seemed far too weird to have possibly made $77 million at the domestic box office. But even when it did, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was too much of a high-wire act to serve as a role model — or, at least, the role model — for the company’s future.
Part of the power of A24 is that it has a strong identity but no one formula for success. Its identity is supple. And I hope it stays that way. But A24, like Miramax before it, is now finding its way to a more mainstream rendition of its groundbreaking, wide-ranging aesthetic. You can see that transition, I think, in the contrast between “Uncut Gems,” which was such a bravura anxiety attack of a movie (there were moments when it out-Scorsese’d Scorsese), and “Marty Supreme,” which plays like “Uncut Gems” remade by Frank Capra — and I mean that as praise. “Marty Supreme” was a feel-good anxiety attack, with Timothée Chalamet as a Ping-Pong wizard who may be a selfish sociopath, but a sociopath who believes. (In himself…and in something larger than himself.) That’s why the film crossed over. (It was A24’s biggest hit.)
And what I see when I think about “The Drama” and “Materialists” is the potential for a new kind of crossover within the A24 grand plan. You can add one more big-gun movie into the mix: Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” which A24 picked up at Sundance in January after a frenzied old-school bidding war, and which it’s releasing as a prime piece of counterprogramming this summer. In my review of it, I said, “It’s as if we’re watching ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ remade by the Woody Allen of ‘Husbands and Wives’.” In other words, it’s an arresting chamber drama and a biting romance.
As for the conversation-piece factor, on that score I think “The Invite” could be a home run. I’m more confident than I would have been, say, two years ago that A24 can elevate it to the status of a must-see movie. They’ve proved that they’ve got the ability not just to market a film but to get a crowd buzzing. But when this kind of thing succeeds, the deepest reason for it is that the movies themselves are feeding an essential hunger on the part of the audience. What the audience for “The Drama,” “Materialists,” and (I predict) “The Invite” is telling us isn’t just “We want cool A24 movies.” It’s saying, “We want mainstream movies that aim high, that make us feel something.” That could be A24 2.0.
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