Backrooms, the recent horror movie mega-hit, is a film replete with ideas about repetition and degradation. Its central theme—the horror of a world that seems to be mindlessly, monstrously, ripping off our own—was regarded in some circles as a critique of generative AI. The idea has clearly struck a nerve. Recently passing $300 million at the global box office, Backrooms has become the biggest hit yet for its buzzy boutique producer and distributor, the New York company A24.

On the back of this box office coup, it’s a bit funny that A24 would recently announce a $75 million research partnership with DeepMind, Google’s in-house artificial intelligence lab. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, the tech giant is teaming up with A24 to create new filmmaking “tools,” as part of A24’s technology startup, A24 Labs, overseen by cofounder Scott Belsky.

“This is a research partnership,” Sophia Shin, who handles communications at A24, tells WIRED in an email. “We're working side-by-side with DeepMind's researchers to learn, iterate, and build having an active hand in shaping new tools and workflows.”

It’s the latest in a line of uneasy, controversial marriages between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Late last year, Disney took a $1 billion stake in OpenAI’s video generation model, Sora, licensing access to characters like Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and C-3PO. A few months later, Sora itself was kaput. AI’s threat to cinema, and the creative arts more generally, can feel completely existential: automating (and killing) entry-level jobs, threatening writers’ rooms, and squatting in multiplexes to showcase AI-generated work that runs the gamut from the boring to the abominable. Some studios have sued AI companies for copyright infringement.

There are also growing concerns that AI’s capture of the film business has a chilling effect, as in the recent case of studios distancing themselves from Luca Guadagnino’s biopic of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Artificial.

The announcement of the A24 AI partnership was especially puzzling, and contentious, precisely because of A24’s place in contemporary film culture.

A24’s legion of diehards do not seem to be taking the news of the A24’s latest collab especially well. Earlier this week, A24 released the trailer for Jesse Eisenberg’s new musical drama The Debut. On X, comments under the trailer were littered with criticism lobbed at A24, from fans posting tombstones and declaring the death of the company, to promises of illegally pirating the movie (to eat into A24’s profits), to snarky remarks like: “Pretty ironic that The Debut is the film that comes out in the mids [sic] of a24 ending itself with ai.” (Your definition of “irony” may vary.)

“Our relationship with our audience is something we don't take for granted,” A24’s Shin stresses. “This partnership exists because we want to dictate what tools get built for artists, and so they have a voice in shaping them rather than having tools handed to them. We'd rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines.”

Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cool Factor

A24 is a huge tastemaker in the film space. “In the same way Disney sells nostalgia, A24 has sold the feeling of being very hip, and cutting-edge, for as long as they’ve been around,” says film critic Esther Rosenfield.

Before Backrooms, A24 spearheaded canonical American indie films like The Witch, Moonlight, Midsommar, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the recent Marty Supreme. The studio has launched, and supported, the work and careers of serious filmmakers like Sophia Coppola, Denis Villeneuve, Ari Aster, Jane Schoenbrun, Celine Song, and the brothers Safdie. It has netted dozens of Academy Award nominations since its 2012 founding. The distinctive A24 logo before a film trailer is, in a moviegoing culture otherwise dominated by tedious franchise IP blockbusters, often enough to build hype for a new release.

It is also the rare American entertainment company to have its own loyal groupies, who flex their own cinephilic bona fides with A24 caps, tote bags, and collectable, limited edition tie-dye t-shirts. You don’t really hear about “Paramount fans” of “Touchstone Pictures-heads.” But A24 has, as they say, shooters.

“They have a very powerful and successful marketing department,” says Andrew DeWaard, a media studies professor at UC San Diego and author of 2024 book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture. “They’ve branded their company as edgy, forward-thinking, and appealing to young people. They’ve created a fandom for their company.”

But for a scholar like DeWaard, the DeepMind deal is not some major, sacrilegious break in A24’s business practices. In Derivative Media, he notes that A24’s cofounder, Daniel Katz, previously led film financing at Guggenheim Partners, the global firm heavily invested in environmentally ruinous resource extraction. In 2024, the company received a significant cash injection from Thrive Capital, which has also invested heavily in OpenAI. A24 Labs head Scott Belsky, who’s at the center of the DeepMind deal, was among the recently leaked names linked to Silicon Valley financier Peter Thiel’s invite-only club, Dialog.

Taste Test

The company’s seat-at-the-table rationale has a familiar ring. The AI takeover of cinema is routinely pitched—by stakeholders in AI firms, incidentally—as fated. It’s not a matter of if, but when. To rail against it, the argument goes, would be as futile as a man on Wednesday railing against Thursday. “They want to make AI feel inevitable,” DeWaard says of AI firms like Google. “They want to make AI feel like it’s everywhere. They want it to feel normal. Culture is part of that.”

Rosenfield regards the deal as a form of positive PR, at least on the part of Google. “They’re saying, ‘We want to launder our reputation through you,’” she says. “We want to make it look like serious artists are going to be making things with these tools. Because serious artists, by and large, aren’t.” (Asked if the Google deal was a form of reputation laundering, A24 offered no comment.)

Among its other concerns, AI definitely suffers from a deficit of taste. Generative AI images are regularly—and accurately—described with the sticky epithet “slop.” Because generative AI clients and large language models are not human, they cannot judge, or discern good and bad, ugly or beautiful, cool or boring.

And of late, it’s precisely this more subtle, sophisticated, definitionally human element that technologists seem desperate to replicate, whether it be by hosting AI-“curated” art exhibitions in San Francisco galleries, or by simply partnering with creative companies whose brand is synonymous with taste. Call it taste-leeching. Elsewhere, a new AI startup, literally called Taste Labs, recently secured $18.5 million in funding for its goal to “eliminate slop” and invest in AI clients with their own tastemaking sensibilities. Good luck with that.

A24’s Shin insists upon the point that this research partnership is not some sort of franchising, or IP play. DeepMind users won’t be able to pay to generate their own little movies featuring copyrighted A24 characters like Howie Rainer from Uncut Gems, The Green Knight, Charles Swan III, or the little lamb from Lamb.

“Truth is we don't necessarily love any of the current AI outputs on screen in Hollywood,” she says. “I don't even know if ultimately we'd create tech on that front. This partnership is about learning and helping pain points in workflows behind the scenes more than anything else.”