It begins fittingly, with a whisper of something strange. A girl confesses: “It was I… It was a witch.” At that moment, “The Witch” announces itself as something rare. A film uninterested in pleasing everyone. Austere, unsettling and unapologetically specific. It is also, not coincidentally, an A24 film.
Over the past decade, A24 has become synonymous with moody, director-driven filmmaking. The kind of filmmaking that is lightly tilted from the ordinary. Alongside peers like Neon and Annapurna, it has helped sustain a space for films that resist the blockbuster economy. These films begin not with intellectual property or franchise potential but with a distinctive voice.
Studios’ ambitions didn’t change; the landscape around them has.
Hollywood has consolidated. The industry today resembles less a creative ecosystem and more a collection of sprawling empires, each one of them engineered for certainty rather than discovery. In 2024, Disney claimed roughly 25% of the domestic box office, or $2.2 billion in ticket sales, all of it sustained by the reliable machinery of its franchises. The studio has led the domestic market in eight of the last nine years, not because it dreams boldly but because it decided it doesn’t need to. In this climate, originality is not just rare. It is structurally discouraged.
This makes what A24 has built all the more striking. The studio does not merely release films; it curates a sensibility, a way of seeing. It bets on filmmakers with something genuine to say and trusts audiences to meet them halfway, and that faith proves well placed. Films like Spring Breakers and Moonlight, the kind most studios would never greenlight, became the foundation for something nobody anticipated. By 2024, A24’s domestic earnings climbed to over $203 million, up from $138 million the year before. Those successes weren’t unnoticed as Thrive Capital’s funding round valued the studio at $3.5 billion, a figure that would have seemed fanciful a decade ago.
But still the financial realities remain harsh for indie studios, which operate in a narrow corridor between cultural influence and financial precarity. Neon’s Oscar campaigns vividly illuminate this tension; To push Parasite for Best Picture, Neon invested $20 million for marketing and distribution, nearly twice the film’s production cost. For Anora, the figure was $18 million, three times the film’s entire budget. “Every independent company is for sale,” Neon’s CEO Tom Quinn told the trade press earlier this year. “We just have no exit plan.” This admission captures the precariousness of the whole enterprise built on conviction, sustained by a willingness to gamble, and never entirely secure.
As major studios expand, they do not just observe competition but also the infrastructure independents depend on to distribute their releases. The numbers tell part of the story. In 2024, the five highest-grossing films accounted for 32% of the domestic market, leaving crumbs for everyone else. The low-budget ethos that once distinguished A24 is eroding under inflation, rising audience expectations, and the momentum of the studio’s own ambitions.
Then there is a subtler risk. A24’s aesthetic and identity, once genuinely daring, now risks becoming a set of recognizable gestures that can be parodied: the slow close-up held a beat too long, the ambiguous ending, the cultivated air of strangeness. What began as artistic instinct can, with enough repetition, become a brand obligation. In an industry with a long memory for what sold last season, even a spirit of rebellion can be packaged and replicated.
Without studios willing to take these films seriously, where do they go? Increasingly, the answer is streaming. Released quietly into an algorithm, consumed quickly, and forgotten just as fast. U.S. box office receipts in 2024 were just a quarter below pre-pandemic levels, the gap filled overwhelmingly by sequels and franchise extensions. In that landscape, companies like A24 and Neon are more than distributors. They are custodians of a different kind of cinematic possibility, one where risk is permitted, and a film’s worth is not determined entirely by its opening weekend.
The irony is that indie studios found their footing by ignoring the logic that now presses against them. They built audiences by trusting that, done well, strangeness would find its viewers. But expectations, once formed, tend to harden, and even A24’s $3.5 billion valuation draws scrutiny when analysts estimate its annual revenue at $200-$300 million.
Perhaps that is simply the condition they must learn to inhabit. Survival as a sustained act of risk, each film a wager on the possibility that cinema still has somewhere left to go. But for now, they remain what they have always been: outliers, believers, the ones still willing to tell a difficult story and trust that it matters.
Hi, I’m Haris. As a student at Bocconi, I’m passionate about the intersection of
economics, arts, and politics. I enjoy examining how global changes and specific
sectors affect individuals and communities worldwide. Writing helps me
challenge narratives, explore complex issues, and participate in meaningful
discussions. At Tra i Leoni, I aim to share thoughtful, well-reasoned perspectives
with an inquisitive audience.
