It is November 2025 when an eighteen-minute Zoom meeting is leaked on YouTube, where we see Timothée Chalamet… yellow tank top, shaved head, crazy look… pitching his own ideas to the A24 marketing team, all more delusional as each other, to promote the film Marty Supreme of which he plays the leading role. Punctuating his speech with thunderous “schwap !â€, he proposes floating a 40-meter-long orange airship above Los Angeles, printing his face on cereal boxes or repainting the Statue of Liberty orange. If the video turns out to be a set-up, in which Chalamet somehow remains in the skin of his megalomaniac character, most of the “shots” will indeed be carried out… until he climbs to the top of the Las Vegas Sphere, transformed for the occasion into a huge ping-pong ball in the colors of the film.
The most expensive feature film in the short history of studio A24 (around 60 million euros), Marty Supreme is also his greatest commercial successwith 150 million euros in global revenue. The marketing campaign therefore proved to be a stroke of genius, although it undoubtedly cost Chalamet his first Oscar, for which he was the favorite until his antics eventually tired the voters. In any case, the operation perfectly illustrates what A24 is today: a machine to produce desire as much as films. No one has better understood how to transform the promotion of a film into a cultural event. We like it or we don’t like it, but we have an opinion… and at the very least, we hear about it, a feat in this era of saturation.
For those who missed the train, A24 is this New York studio founded fourteen years ago by Daniel Katz and David Fenkel [ainsi que John Hodges qui a quitté la société depuis], two film buffs convinced that there was a deserted space between broke independent cinema and big Hollywood franchises, and which has today become America’s most influential production and distribution house. Legend has it that this name came to them on the Italian A ventiquattro highway, towards Rome. Interviewed by us a few years ago, the two founders neither confirmed nor denied, remaining as vague as they were discreet…
What is certain is that in the fall of 2012, with a few million dollars in their pockets advanced by adventurous investors, they arrived on the market
of the Toronto film with an idea… simple on paper, risky in reality…: focusing on original, bizarre objects, difficult to summarize but with a strong potential for virality, at a time when social networks are making it a key concept. “Lots of films we loved no longer found buyers, Fenkel remembers. At the same time, we saw other companies spending crazy amounts of money on marketing for mediocre results.†Their first big success will be Spring Breakers d’Harmony Korine : a radical and colorful strangeness carried by a punk filmmaker and a pop cast (James Franco, Selena Gomez, Gucci Mane). Immediate success. Will follow, in bulk, Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer), The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola), Out of the Machine (Alex Garland), The Witch (Robert Eggers), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig), On the path to redemption (Paul Schrader), Midsummer (Ari Aster), First Cow (Kelly Reichardt), Uncut Gems (Joshua and Ben Safdie), Past Lives (Celine Song). An impressive map of contemporary American auteur cinema. These films are not alike, there is something for all tastes (horror, comedy, drama, science fiction…) but they share the same promise: singularity as their reason for being. It is that, at A24, directors are kings (or queens) and their vision respected all the way to the editing room… which does not go without saying in Hollywood, where the final cut belongs to the producer.
Artistic legitimacy quickly translated into institutional prestige… Moonlight by Barry Jenkins won three Oscars in 2017, including Best Picture (against La La Land, no one has forgotten the imbroglio), Everything Everywhere All at Once des Daniels won seven in 2023, and La Zone d’intérêt by Jonathan Glazer stood out as best international film in 2024. A24 applies the same authorial logic to television with series like EuphoriaBeef, Ramy or The Curse, which favor original shapes and benefit from the same signature effect.
If A24’s turnover remains far from those of the large traditional studios (Universal, Warner, Disney, Sony, Paramount), its growing success has earned it a valuation of $3.5 billion in 2024 after fundraising. Succeeding in what many thought impossible…: speaking to critics, festivals and academies, without losing a young audience (mostly under 40) who go to see his films the way you buy a record from a label you love. One question remains: how long can this equation hold? As A24 grows, there is a risk that its uniqueness will become a formula. But for now, in an industry obsessed with security, the studio remains a valuable anomaly… a place where cinema can still surprise.
Article published in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar of May 2026.
