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A24's Empire of Auteurs

The studio is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too.

Jonathan Glazer’s captivatingly hypnotic, half-improvised “Under the Skin,” which stars Scarlett Johansson as an alien who hunts lonely human men, had no other offers for a U.S. theatrical release; Garland’s wily “Ex Machina,” about an erratic tech billionaire who summons an employee to perform the Turing test on a beautiful android, had been dropped by its distributor. Legacy studios such as Sony Pictures have attempted to buy a stake in A24; instead, the company has opted to take Wall Street money, preferring not to be drawn into what one executive called Hollywood’s “hundred years of doing things a certain way.” But emphasizing innovation comes with other hazards. Belsky is building a team of engineers and designers who—in his words—“see storytelling as the ultimate delivery mechanism for inspiration and hard truths.” His mandate is partly to develop tools for internal use, including some in the realms of predictive marketing and audience discovery, but he has said that his goal is to help “the world’s greatest creators take more creative risk” by making it easier to “explore the full landscape of their imagination,” from ideation onward.

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