A24 spent a decade becoming the studio film fans trust, the name behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hereditary, and Uncut Gems. So it turned heads this week when the studio said it is taking money and research help from Google to build AI tools. The figure is about $75 million from Google's DeepMind lab, and the framing is deliberate: this is AI for the people who make films, shaped by their feedback, not a machine that makes the films for them.
What the deal actually is
The two sides announced a multiyear, non-exclusive research partnership. DeepMind hands A24 access to its research and infrastructure, and its researchers will work alongside A24 Labs, a roughly 20-person technology team led by A24 partner Scott Belsky, to build new filmmaking workflows. The reported $75 million investment is in line with what the venture firm Thrive Capital put in during A24's last funding round.
One detail matters more than the money. The deal does not give Google any access to A24's film library or its data. For a studio whose whole brand is the work itself, walling off the catalog is the point.
The first tool is about planning, not generating
The early project underway is a tool that uses AI to help generate storyboards, the rough visual sketches a director uses to map out scenes before cameras roll. The goal Belsky describes is catching logistical and production problems early, when they are cheap to fix, while leaving the creative choices to the humans.
That is a narrower and less alarming use of AI than the text-to-video demos that have made Hollywood nervous. Belsky was blunt about the distinction, saying the tools "won't look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with," and that A24 sees "better uses that preserve creative control and support risk-taking."
Why A24 is being so careful
The caution is not an accident. The film world spent the last two years in open conflict with generative AI, from the 2023 strikes to ongoing fights over training data and actor likenesses. A24's audience skews toward exactly the people most protective of human authorship.
So the studio is threading a needle: adopt the technology, but on terms that keep the director in charge and the brand intact. Eli Collins of Google DeepMind framed the partnership as making sure "the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them," which is the polite version of the same idea.
My feelings here are split. A24 has the best taste in film of anyone over the past twenty years, so seeing that sensibility shape the AI tools coming out of a lab like DeepMind genuinely excites me. The taste gap in AI creative tools is still huge, and A24 is exactly the kind of partner you would want helping to close it.
It also stings. Plenty of filmmakers and cinephiles will hate seeing A24, of all studios, touch AI. What keeps me hopeful is that the tools are being built around what filmmakers actually want from them. If anyone can pull this off without hollowing out the craft, it's them.
Sources
- Google DeepMind and A24 announce first-of-its-kind research partnership (Google)
- Google is investing in A24 (WSJ, original scoop)
- Google DeepMind bets $75M on AI's future in Hollywood with A24 (TechCrunch)
- Google Invests $75 Million in A24 to Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools (Variety)
- A24 and Google DeepMind form AI Partnership (The Hollywood Reporter)
- Indie darling A24 takes $75M from Google for AI research (Gizmodo)