“Elden Ring,” one of the most popular video games of all time, takes place in a fantasy realm called Lands Between, a space between life and death where humans fight gods and monsters for power.
A24 just finished production on the film adaptation, representing the company’s biggest milestone to date. The action epic, starring Kit Connor and directed by Alex Garland, comes with a whopping $200 million price tag. The film’s otherworldly setting is appropriate, because the arthouse giant currently occupies middle ground: It’s no longer a scrappy independent studio challenging the establishment, it’s not yet a merged or acquired corporate monolith working its way up to the big studio table.
But this year will remain A24’s most profitable thanks to the dazzling success of “Backrooms”, a generation Z horror film and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, “You Can See Everything”. These titles and others propelled A24 above $500 million at the domestic box office for the first time.
A24 could also boast being the studio with the most Oscar nominations, just as its fledgling TV division began producing serious hits (following HBO’s “Euphoria” with Peacock’s “Crystal Lake,” HBO’s “Neighbors” and Apple TV’s “Margot’s Got Money Troubles”). The traction A24 enjoys during this time of massive industry-wide disruption and consolidation is true flexibility from one of the most ironclad entertainment brands. But all this momentum begs the question: what does the A24 want to be?
“If they ever want to monetize, now is the time to do it,” one high-flying mogul says of A24. Speculation about the studio’s M&A potential has swirled around town since its founding in 2013. Led by founders David Fenkel and Daniel Katz, A24 has flirted with buyers like Apple and Sony over the years. But no deal came to fruition because Fenkel and Katz ruthlessly protected A24’s cool side (the abstract secret sauce that trained younger generations to reclaim the cinematic experience and make avant-garde auteur artists their idols). They’ve turned down a slew of recent stock investment offers and have exercised such tight creative control as first-person gamers cherish the mythic strengths of “Elden Ring.”
Within A24, the dominant logic in recent years has been to “grow from within,” as underscored by the 2021 hiring of NBA CFO JB Lockhart to help the company scale at a prudent pace. Insiders also attribute this steady growth to COO Matt Bires (an architect of A24’s Cherry Lane Theater acquisition), global head of television Ravi Nandan (Fielder’s whisperer) and all-important marketing executive Graham Retzlik. But make no mistake, the source says: “Fenkel and Katz are absolutely interested in getting rich.”
A24’s last fundraising round took place in mid-2024, through Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, and valued the company at $3.5 billion. That’s a modest sum compared to the whopping $111 billion check Skydance wrote to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, but nevertheless a figure that three sources at competing companies consider out of line with market realities.
“They have a great brand, but in an acquisition scenario we’ve seen that brands don’t really survive. Look at what Disney did to FX and 20th Century Fox,” says another senior executive. “Their profits look good, especially this year, but the pressure is on to achieve the valuation they were looking for.”
To that end, the studio has experimented with higher prices and flashier intellectual property, such as a recent massive deal for the film and television rights to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” However, the studio’s efforts to move beyond its low-budget roots have been mixed. Last year, dice rolls — like Ari Aster’s “Eddington” and Dwayne Johnson’s “The Smashing Machine,” which each took $50 million — flopped at the box office.
Despite tough results in 2025, A24 has rebounded significantly this year. “You Can See Everything” (a whopping $64 million to date) and “The Drama,” an offbeat relationship comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson ($134 million worldwide), have become hits in genres that don’t always resonate on the big screen. Not to mention “Backrooms,” a hugely profitable sensation that became the studio’s highest-grossing film with $400 million worldwide against a $10 million budget. Over the summer, A24 managed to beat Warner Bros. and Paramount in terms of market share, one of the rare times when an independent film has overtaken the major studios during what is usually the busiest period for cinema. All the riches of “Backrooms” and “You Can See Everything” will wipe away the red ink of duds like Glen Powell’s action comedy “How to Make a Killing” ($21 million against a $15 million budget), Hugh Jackman’s revisionist “The Death of Robin Hood” ($9.8 million against a $20 million budget) and Chris Rock’s comedy-drama “Misty Green” ($160,000 against a budget of 5 million dollars).
Its rivals criticize A24 for skillfully burying its failures. This is partly because the company does not manage the overseas rollout of its films, but rather sells foreign rights to regional distributors. This helps the studio recoup losses from underperforming films. But it also means that A24 does not benefit from inordinate wealth when a title like “Backrooms” brings in more than $200 million internationally.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Fenkel and Katz have traveled the world over the past year looking for “potential partners” to help A24 establish ports in foreign markets. The announced plan is to find local language teams with similar sensibilities to those in the United States. Placing this type of creative trust in satellite offices could be a risky proposition, although less expensive than creating an international distribution engine. The founders don’t seem to mind racking up miles of sky: the A24 is, perhaps preciously, named after the highway that connects Rome to the picturesque Italian mountain town of Teroma.
As A24 expands with larger budgets, the challenge will be connecting with audiences beyond the shores. Part of the charm for moviegoers and the appeal for auteurists is that the studio isn’t trying to make movies for everyone. Some of the company’s hottest films were extremely polarizing. Consider the CinemaScore for favorites like “Hereditary” (D+), Adam Sandler’s “Uncut Gems” (C+) or “Backrooms” (B-). None of these films cost more than $20 million to produce, so they didn’t need to resonate with mainstream audiences. However, “Elden Ring” and the $35 million slasher “Slayground” due out next year cannot afford to alienate most of the country.
“When you talk about these awards, you have to talk about four quadrants. A24 didn’t build their brand on four-quadrant films. They pursued two quadrants very hard,” says Travis Knox, associate professor of production at Chapman University. “With budgets over $100 million, you can’t ignore Oklahoma and Indiana.”
Beyond movies, TV shows and viral products, A24 has physical assets at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater and a controversial $75 million investment from Google DeepMind to develop AI tools for filmmakers. This is added value for a large sale, although Knox points out an important caveat for any transaction. A24’s greatest asset is the power of its brand to attract younger audiences to cinemas and television platforms without the stench of corporate greed.
“If they were bought by, say, Amazon… that would automatically alienate the public,” says Knox.
Gn entert
