The rebellious indie film studio A24 is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too. Plus:

David Remnick 
Editor, The New Yorker

A casual moviegoer might show up for the actors. And a cinephile wants to talk about the director. But now many movie fans know that the studio also counts.

For this week’s special double issue, Alex Barasch reports on the rise and the indie dominance of A24, which since its founding, in 2012, has built an ardent following with movies such as “Moonlight,” “The Brutalist,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and many more, including some first-rate horror films. In addition, A24 does brisk sales in merch (sweatshirts, dog leashes), and hosts a fan club with roughly a hundred thousand paying members. Some acolytes have even gotten tattoos of the studio’s logo.

Until now, A24’s leading executives have generally avoided reporters, deflecting attention to its filmmakers. Alex managed to gain access to the people behind the studio as never before, and the story he tells is as revealing as anything written about M-G-M in its glory days or Miramax before the fall.

Part of A24’s cachet undoubtedly comes from its discerning taste in collaborators: filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola, Alex Garland, Ari Aster, and Barry Jenkins. But Alex notes that, despite its work with highly individual directors, the studio’s films have a unifying quality: “each one feels, for better or worse, like the product of a singular mind.” That “mind” is composed of a core group of executives who collaborate on nearly every phase of the project: green-lighting a movie, helping in the editing room, cheering up a nervous director, selling the movie to audiences. A24’s marketing campaigns are often closely coördinated with filmmakers, but they are also branding exercises for the studio itself. A decade ago, to promote Robert Eggers’s début feature, “The Witch,” it partnered with the Satanic Temple; last year’s Nicole Kidman vehicle, “Babygirl,” spawned a viral TikTok phenomenon of women posting videos of themselves swooning in the theatre after screenings.

“Even the money guys at A24 are cinéastes,” Alex writes. But they are also, after all, money guys. A24 started small, taking chances on filmmakers and projects that other studios didn’t quite understand. In the years since, it has branched out into television and theatre, and now its film division is making ever-bigger bets on movies with more lavish budgets backed by Wall Street funding. A new guiding principle, as Noah Sacco, the studio’s head of film, puts it, is to answer the question “What else does the world not think should live on three thousand screens?” The seeming move toward larger-scale films has left some earlier collaborators out of the picture. Hollywood is watching A24 carefully, seeing if the studio can sell expensive original movies to a broader audience. Sacco tells Alex, “If we’re another casualty in the struggle to make something quality mainstream, that would suck.” Well, yes.

Plus: I hope you check out this week’s cover, by Cindy Sherman—a reinterpretation of The New Yorker’s mascot, Eustace Tilley, and just the second photograph to appear on the front of the magazine in the past hundred years.

Kilmar Ábrego García, the man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador by the Trump Administration earlier this year, and whose return to the U.S. the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate,” was detained again today in Baltimore. He now faces another potential deportation, this time to Uganda.

How bad is it? “The political prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García has entered a new phase,” Cristian Farias, a legal journalist who has written about various Trump-era court cases for The New Yorker, told us over e-mail. “Before, he was just a Salvadoran immigrant worker who was wrongfully deported. Everyone was on the same page about that—even a unanimous Supreme Court, which ordered the government to facilitate his return to the U.S.

“But then something shifted. In the intervening months, the Trump Administration has waged a campaign of demonization, criminalization, and political prosecution against him. Since that shift, Kilmar Ábrego García has been a political prisoner.” His rearrest this morning by ICE, after his release on Friday and a brief reunification with his family in Maryland, is “just a piece” of that persecution.

Members of Congress returned to their home districts this summer, only to be greeted by angry voters. Antonia Hitchens reports on the chilly receptions they’ve been receiving. Read the story »

P.S. A zoo in Denmark is asking people to donate their pets—as prey for captive predators. How about, instead, we get rid of the zoos? 🐼