With a catalog full of art house favorites like The Witch, Spring Breakers, Moonlight, and Uncut Gems, it’s hard to deny that A24 occupies a unique position in the zeitgeist. In a Hollywood landscape that can feel like it’s becoming more risk-averse by the year — see our recent episode with Andrew Dewaard on his book Derivative Media — the artist-forward distributor and studio has become synonymous with a dream that, to many American cultural producers, feels increasingly remote: the conviction that one can doggedly put quality art out into the marketplace and see it actually succeed.

But is A24 singlehandedly saving American cinema, or is that just a carefully crafted illusion, more a testament to the importance of smart brand positioning than to the actual quality of the films in its catalog? We brought on the Las Vegas-based writer and critic Nicholas Russell, author of an excellent essay for Dirt called “The Popular Alternative: the State of A24,” to discuss how the company evolved from an upstart indie film distributor to a studio and lifestyle brand in the mold of Disney — albeit one for adults who pride themselves in being savvy cultural consumers.

We talk about how the company successfully commodified the idea of being “a cinephile,” the similarities between the A24 cap and the New York tote, and what Nicholas describes as the longstanding “tension between A24 the studio and A24 the startup” — one recently complicated by a $100 million cash injection from Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, a major investor in OpenAI. We also try to break down the ineffable A24 “feel” (including the aesthetic elements and political themes the company tends to foreground, and shy away from) and consider the rise of Neon — the distributor behind movies like Parasite, Anora, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline — as the “other popular alternative.”

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Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider, “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty” (Princeton UP, 2017)