A24 is at the same stage of the hype curve Netflix was with House of Cards. They're going to commoditize their own aesthetic, expand until quality is mediocre at best, rinse and repeat.
replies(5):
- Land Rover building reputation with their rugged Defender and then cashing in on that by pivoting to a far less capable luxury SUV. Same with most off road cars.
- North Face making serious mountaineering gear to suburban fashion brand with reduced quality.
- Blue Bottle going from a high quality local SF chain to scaling internationally under Nestle. (and quality taking a hit)
etc, etc...
the writing was on the wall once they won their first Oscar.
but, at least they've proven that there is success to be had in creating new IP. there will be people who will watch your movies if you actually create something new. the cycle of nothing but sequels, remakes, and universe movies has been hilariously bad for years.
we do still have the unfortunate reality that most of the studios have been bought up and are run by people who are ... to be kind ... bean counters who have no affinity for movies. but the bright side to this is we will almost certainly have another massive independent movie bonanza similar to the late 90s to fill that void.
Once a brand accumulates sufficient reputational capital through genuine quality, the profit-maximizing imperative inevitably drives extraction over quality. (I would extend this argument briefly outside of the domain of economic theory and into physics: we do not observe low entropy being temporally consistent anywhere in the universe.)
The market doesn’t reward maintaining expensive quality standards when cheaper alternatives can temporarily coast on accumulated goodwill - shareholders demand margin expansion, private equity needs returns, and the competitive landscape punishes companies that leave money on the table by over-investing in product integrity.
Less of a moral failure by individual companies and more structural incentive alignment: capitalism systematically rewards converting hard won brand trust into extractable rents until the reputation is depleted, at which point capital simply moves to the next target.
The pattern you’re observing isn’t a bug but the logical endpoint of a system that treats reputation as just another asset to be optimized for shareholder value rather than a covenant with customers.
Regardless of who's making them ot how, films have lost the qualities of contemplation and of making the audience draw their own conclusions. That's an even bigger marker of cultural and educational decline than the fact that franchises have been cannibalizing themselves for at least 30 years since our golden age ended.
Attempts to capture truth mutate into displays of pathos (and bigger explosions) when civilizations are on their way out.
A24 is kind of looking like United Artists, a studio that produced many critically acclaimed films in the 1970s. What was UA's downfall? A move into bigger budget films. One bigger budget film, specifically: Heaven's Gate (1980), directed my Michael Cimino. The production went so over budget it bankrupted the studio and that marked the end of that era of auteur driven cinema.
Let's hope A24 doesn't make the same mistake, because as it is about half the new films I saw in theatres and enjoyed over the last decade came from A24, or from a director who has worked with A24.
> The studio is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too.
God damnit. The best modern film studio in the world about to become a slop house.
The world is missing low budget and mid-market. There's so much appetite for it. We don't need more blockbusters. The world needs the product A24 is delivering now.
Almost everyone on HN has witnessed something similar happen in our spheres. We've all seen the marketing dept, accounting dept, and VC chodes band together and push the engineers into the background. They forget the engineers are the people who made the magic happen for the product in the first place. And then, before we know it, the equivalent of a private equity enshitification is happening and its either stripped to nothing of substance or it just coasts along and does the absolute bare minimum to survive. All the heart of the product gone. I know it sounds dramatic, but they kill its soul. I think almost everyone here has seen this happen directly to our own things or to other products.
It looks like they're trying their best to do the same thing to movie studios. Investment firms are buying up studios across the board. Marketers, ad companies, and investors will do their best to suck all of the soul out of movies the same way they're doing it to our field. Pushing the movie makers into the background just like they do to engineers.
The difference from my perspective and the reason I'm not too concerned is this: the tech industry is relatively young and up until recently many of us (myself included) have found ourselves worshiping at the VC/investor's alters. We find ourselves buying into their hype.
Artists on the other hand see the VC/investor's slop alters and see that alter demanding they make a shitty product. In typical artist fasion, they take a long look at that alter, unzip their pants, laugh, and piss on that alter.
While artists have long since learned what happens when you worship at those alters, we in the tech field are just finding out. They've known this since before our industry was even born.
I think this is why we've seen so many phases where movies/music makers, if they have to, they'll just make cheap movies. A good cheaply made movie is still better than a high budget slop shit movie. People show up for good movies, even cheap ones. People forgive the low budget quality if its great.
At the end of the day this is why I'm not too concerned about the future of movies. I have no doubt great movies will still be made. Some of my favorite movies were made outside those people's alters, cheap af. I mean, who doesn't love Halloween or Evil Dead or Clerks!? All of them were made cheap af.
Always remember, Clerks was made by a dude while working as a convenience store clerk. A convenience clerk made it using his credit cards. He had basically no budget.