Is A24, the Indie Upstart with a Fresh Best-Picture Win, the Next Miramax?

At Sunday night’s Academy Awards, Moonlight earned its place in Oscar history. The tender Barry Jenkins-directed drama took home three awards, including Hollywood’s be-all, end-all prize: best picture, bestowed after one of the most jaw-dropping moments in Oscar history. Though Moonlight’s win was a massive upset in a ceremony expected to be dominated by La La Land, it also signaled something else for all the business-minded prognosticators of awards season—A24, the five-year-old distribution company that also financed Moonlight, has truly arrived.

The company’s ascent up Hollywood’s awards ladder began at the 2016 Academy Awards, where Brie Larson picked up the best actress Oscar for Room, Amy was named best documentary, and Ex Machina got the prize for best visual effects—all A24 films. In one night, the company, founded by Daniel Katz, John Hodges, and David Fenkel, saw its upstart, cool-kid reputation translate into serious hardware.

The distributor followed those triumphs by nurturing a series of eclectic, buzzed-about movies in 2016, including the slow, trembling horror of The Witch; the exacting dystopian world of The Lobster; the disarming drifter saga of American Honey; the gut-churning violence of Green Room; and the good-hearted strangeness of Swiss Army Man. And then there was Moonlight, Jenkins’s sophomore feature about a lonely boy, who becomes a troubled teen, who becomes a stoic man. The film was nominated for eight awards Sunday, including best picture. (The Lobster and another A24 film, 20th Century Women, were also up for screenplay prizes, though they did not win.) Moonlight went home with Oscar’s top honor, along with two other statuettes—for best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay. “Even in my dreams this could not be true,” Jenkins exclaimed from the Oscars stage, after finally taking the podium to accept the film’s best picture statuette. “But to hell with dreams! I’m done with it, because this is true. Oh, my goodness.”

“We spent the first part of the night just in shock at the governor’s ball and then made our way to Vanity Fair toasting Barry, Tarell [Alvin McCraney, the co-writer], and the rest of our filmmaker partners,“ A24 said via e-mail Monday. “Our whole staff was here from NY as well and they were all celebrating and going nuts at a viewing party.”

All this is a sign that A24 is becoming one of the leading tastemakers in Hollywood, thanks to its knack for identifying and championing filmmakers with keen visions. In an age defined by franchise dreams and $200 million superhero movies, indie filmmakers (and blockbuster-weary fans, frankly) are increasingly desperate to find cinema’s new hero. Contenders abound: Netflix and Amazon (both of which also won their first Oscars on Sunday night) are currently slugging it out over the rights to the hottest properties at festivals from Park City to Berlin in a global prizefight for Oscar gold. There’s also Annapurna, Megan Ellison’s production company, which broke big in 2012 with The Master and Zero Dark Thirty and co-produced Spring Breakers, which A24 distributed. This is to say nothing of established competitors like Fox Searchlight, which put out best-picture winners like Birdman and 12 Years a Slave, or fellow newbies Broad Green Pictures and Bleecker Street. Still, no other Hollywood upstart has had more recent awards-season success than A24. And as Moonlight marched past La La Land on Sunday, it capped an incredible hot streak for the company. A24, by all traditional industry definitions, won the award that everyone wants—just five years after its founding.

“They’re auteur-enablers,” producer Adele Romanski (Moonlight, and the upcoming Under the Silver Lake, another A24 film) said in an interview with Vanity Fair conducted during awards season. “If Annapurna is working with . . . established auteurs, then A24 is . . . creating a space and cultivating the rise of the new emerging class of auteurs.”

Of course, distributors have made such runs in the past, particularly in the 1990s. As Peter Biskind put it in his 2004 industry tell-all, Down and Dirty Pictures: if the 1970s was a director’s decade, the 90s belonged to the marketers and distributors. So what’s the secret to indie success in 2017, an age of streaming giants seeking Oscar glory, industry consolidation, and green-light committees? And can it last?

“When I said I wanted to cast three different actors to play the main character—and I was pretty sure those three actors weren’t going to be names or famous—they didn’t balk,” Jenkins told Vanity Fair in December. The director was recalling his first meeting with A24 co-founder Daniel Katz. They chatted over sushi, talking about the script “purely in creative terms,” Jenkins said. “They understood. From the very beginning, it just felt like a very safe space to make this film.”

Jonah Hill, who is working on his directorial debut with A24, has painted a picture of an engaged, tightly knit office, recently telling The Wall Street Journal Magazine that he was invited to come in and “walk the whole staff through the movie,” so that everyone was fully invested in and familiar with his vision. Miranda Bailey, one of six producers for Swiss Army Man, said in an interview with V.F. that the company involved all of them—and the film’s two directors—throughout the marketing process. Typically, she said, once a distributor takes a film, the creative team gets “pushed to the side.”

“[But] we don’t want to have sell it and go, ‘Bye! There goes three years of our lives! Hope you do a good job with it!’ ” she explained with a laugh.

This notion—that A24 really listens to its creative partners—is one that comes up often with collaborators. Bailey’s co-producer Amanda Marshall told V.F. that the company actively tried to court a younger audience for the film, sending Swiss Army Man bongs and Daniel Radcliffe beach towels to members of the press. The company also created a Radcliffe dummy for a social campaign. Witch producer Thomas Benski credits the company’s “bespoke“ marketing campaign for helping the film’s surprising $40 million global box-office haul. “I don’t know if someone else could have done that,” he told V.F. “They’re structured as a modern company, and I think there’s a huge advantage to starting fresh.”

Even A24’s social-media presence comes with a devil-may-care factor. The company's Twitter is mainly focused on promoting its movies, but it’s more tongue-in-cheek than the typical corporate account—as in this viral tweet about sneaking a screener of Moonlight to Vice President Mike Pence, a notoriously anti-L.G.B.T. legislator.

The sharp rise of A24 reminds a lot of insiders of another scrappy upstart: Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax, a bold disruptor with a penchant for edgy films like Pulp Fiction. It made a quick ascent up the Hollywood ladder and served as a direct inspiration for A24’s founders, according to a recent profile in W.S.J. Magazine. And A24, like Miramax before it, adheres mostly to traditional models of acquisition, snapping up buzzy films at festivals just like everybody else. (This year at Sundance, the company purchased its first foreign-language film, Menashe, and the Casey Affleck drama A Ghost Story.)

However, there are a few key differences between A24 and its forerunner. Miramax was a victim of its own over-expansion; the company scaled up too quickly and spent too much, Alisa Perren, author of Indie, Inc. and an associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, told Vanity Fair. “There’s so few players in the landscape that are meeting with success.”

But A24 has appeared relatively methodical (though still experimental) in its purchases, with curious outliers like a recently acquired eight-minute sci-fi short set in Japan, according to the W.S.J. profile. The company also has a multi-year streaming deal with Amazon Prime, which sets it up for some security in the digital age, in addition to a $40 million VOD deal with DirecTV for joint acquisitions, which provides a cushion for films that may not be strong enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with A24’s main slate.

Like Miramax before it, A24 has also found success with sci-fi and horror genre films; Ex Machina and The Witch are the company’s highest-grossing films thus far, and it has a few horror movies keyed up for this year as well. As Bob Weinstein learned when he built Miramax subsidiary Dimension Films on the box-office receipts of the Scream franchise, horror movies are reliable moneymakers that can be made on minuscule budgets while still reaping exceptional returns. A24 is also getting into the highly lucrative TV world, a vital move for any company assessing the platform’s current golden age. (“It's incredibly flattering,“ A24 said via e-mail of the Miramax comparisons. “Miramax was awesome and incredibly inspirational to us.”)

Miramax and A24, however, have immensely different cults of personality. “Miramax was about the brand of Miramax,” Perren said. Whereas Harvey Weinstein became a regular character in the trades and beyond, A24 has opted instead for the mysterious route, sometimes to the annoyance of industry peers. And its founders are fairly press-averse—though not enough not to occasionally open up the hood and allow a reporter to visit and observe A24’s young and engaged New York office. In a 2015 profile of the company for Slate, writer David Ehrlich noted that “no one in the company is older than 42.” (The company initially declined Vanity Fair’s request for an interview for this piece while reporting in the run up to the Academy Awards, but provided comment after the ceremony.)

Moonlight is the only film A24 has financed itself so far. And financing one $1.6 million movie, however beautifully made and adorned in awards season gold, does not automatically make one a top player. “I think people are pretty desperate to believe things can exist outside of the big budget [world],” Perren said. “There’s so few players in the landscape that are meeting with success.”

As an executive at a major studio competing with A24 in the best-picture race said before Sunday’s surprise win: “Look how many theaters our movie is in. Look how much money we’re putting into the ads. A24 is cool, but they can’t compete.” An agent who represents several top directors similarly shrugged before the Academy Awards, seeming indifferent about the company’s rising profile. “Would I take my projects there? I’d rather do business with Megan Ellison, who has a sheen, or Amazon, which put a ton of money into P&A [prints and advertising] for Manchester [by the Sea].”

There’s also the fact that A24 is still a young, relatively small company in a rapidly changing industry that is faced with steadily declining revenues. Fewer people are going to the movies these days, and no matter how many game-changing films A24 releases, it still has to grapple with this reality. It also has a much smaller catalog to fall back on than older, richer companies.

The closest the A24 founders seem to have come to embracing their inner Weinstein is joking about the “shitty fucking table” they got at the Governors Ball last year, Katz told the W.S.J. “We shouldn’t and don’t normally care about that—but when you live in Los Angeles, every other step you take is about trying to get to the center table—versus just trying to do good work.”

How its movies performed on Oscar night (and how many more projects A24 finances) will certainly affect the journey to that coveted center table. Moonlight has received nothing but goodwill and critical praise, and is now a part of Academy history. All eyes are on Jenkins now as he prepares for whatever project stirs him next. (After all, to really play with the top guns, A24 will have to prove that it can keep homegrown talent like him on its roster even after that talent breaks big.) He politely declined Vanity Fair’s inquiries about whether he's got something new in the works with A24, saying he hopes to work with the company again. On Monday, best picture Oscar in hand, the company said the feeling was mutual: “We would love to work with Barry again absolutely. He's the best.“

Additional reporting by Rebecca Keegan.