A24 has spent years carefully crafting its image as a canny underdog studio that platforms artist driven films. It commands incredible loyalty among moviegoers, with its brand often preceding the names of the actual talent involved in its production. A new movie is an A24 movie, director or lead actor be damned.

But with incredible loyalty also comes incredible disappointment. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is investing $75 million into A24, as part of an AI research partnership to create AI tools for moviemaking.

Needless to say, fans of the studio weren’t impressed.

“There goes A24,” eulogized one viral tweet.

“Why do they keep forcing AI on us,” lamented another.

Though the size of the investment isn’t enormous by the standards of the tech industry, the partnership is symbolically significant, marking one of the few collaborations between a mainstream studio and an AI firm. Disney entered a landmark partnership with OpenAI last year, but that ended ignominiously when OpenAI suddenly shut down its Sora video generator tool in March. 

According to the WSJ‘s reporting, the collaboration with Google’s DeepMind AI lab will help create “new tools for movie production and distribution.” It doesn’t give Google access to A24’s data, including its film library.

Scott Belsky, an A24 partner, acknowledged that filmmakers’ ambivalence towards AI tech. That’s just because no one is doing AI the correct and artistic way, of course.

“We think there are better uses that preserve creative control and support risk-taking,” Belsky told the WSJ. The new tools “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with,” he added/

Except maybe they will be. Belsky’s 20 person team, A24 Labs, is already developing a tool for AI-generated storyboards. Revered director Martin Scorsese recently endorsed an AI startup that provided storyboarding tools, precipitating an existential crisis among cineastes.

Following news of the deal, A24 fans haven’t hesitated to point out that Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old who directed A24’s most successful film to date with “Backrooms,” had recently fulminated at AI being used in the arts. Many view his hit horror film —now A24’s largest opening ever — as an allegory for AI.

“If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would,” Parsons said in an interview. “Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”

“To me,” he added, “generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”

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