Backrooms, the recent horror movie mega-hit, is a film replete with ideas about repetition and degradation. Its central theme—the horror of a world that seems to be mindlessly, monstrously, ripping off our own—was regarded in some circles as a critique of generative AI. The idea has clearly struck a nerve. Recently passing $300 million at the global box office, Backrooms has become the biggest hit yet for its buzzy boutique producer and distributor, the New York company A24.
On the back of this box office coup, it’s a bit funny that A24 would recently announce a $75 million research partnership with DeepMind, Google’s in-house artificial intelligence lab. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, the tech giant is teaming up with A24 to create new filmmaking “tools,” as part of A24’s technology startup, A24 Labs, overseen by cofounder Scott Belsky.
“This is a research partnership,” Sophia Shin, who handles communications at A24, tells WIRED in an email. “We’re working side-by-side with DeepMind’s researchers to learn, iterate, and build having an active hand in shaping new tools and workflows.”
It’s the latest in a line of uneasy, controversial marriages between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Late last year, Disney took a $1 billion stake in OpenAI’s video generation model, Sora, licensing access to characters like Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and C-3PO. A few months later, Sora itself was kaput. AI’s threat to cinema, and the creative arts more generally, can feel completely existential: automating (and killing) entry-level jobs, threatening writers’ rooms, and squatting in multiplexes to showcase AI-generated work that runs the gamut from the boring to the abominable. Some studios have sued AI companies for copyright infringement.
There are also growing concerns that AI’s capture of the film business has a chilling effect, as in the recent case of studios distancing themselves from Luca Guadagnino’s biopic of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Artificial.
The announcement of the A24 AI partnership was especially puzzling, and contentious, precisely because of A24’s place in contemporary film culture.
A24’s legion of diehards do not seem to be taking the news of the A24’s latest collab especially well. Earlier this week, A24 released the trailer for Jesse Eisenberg’s new musical drama The Debut. On X, comments under the trailer were littered with criticism lobbed at A24, from fans posting tombstones and declaring the death of the company, to promises of illegally pirating the movie (to eat into A24’s profits), to snarky remarks like: “Pretty ironic that The Debut is the film that comes out in the mids [sic] of a24 ending itself with ai.” (Your definition of “irony” may vary.)
“Our relationship with our audience is something we don’t take for granted,” A24’s Shin stresses. “This partnership exists because we want to dictate what tools get built for artists, and so they have a voice in shaping them rather than having tools handed to them. We’d rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines.”
Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Cool Factor
A24 is a huge tastemaker in the film space. “In the same way Disney sells nostalgia, A24 has sold the feeling of being very hip, and cutting-edge, for as long as they’ve been around,” says film critic Esther Rosenfield.
Before Backrooms, A24 spearheaded canonical American indie films like The Witch, Moonlight, Midsommar, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the recent Marty Supreme. The studio has launched, and supported, the work and careers of serious filmmakers like Sophia Coppola, Denis Villeneuve, Ari Aster, Jane Schoenbrun, Celine Song, and the brothers Safdie. It has netted dozens of Academy Award nominations since its 2012 founding. The distinctive A24 logo before a film trailer is, in a moviegoing culture otherwise dominated by tedious franchise IP blockbusters, often enough to build hype for a new release.
