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A24 is the rare Hollywood studio that still moves culture as its own brand. Its logo alone can make people interested in a movie before they know what it is — it has turned “A24 vibes” into shorthand for taste, emotional damage and at least one scene of someone frozen in a perfectly ordinary room while their entire life collapses internally. It’s the studio behind moments that have become touchstones of their own: the choreographed unease of Nathan (Oscar Isaac) dancing with his AI creation in Ex Machina, Florence Pugh‘s Dani having a sunlit communal breakdown as the May Queen in Midsommar, the unrelenting auction spiral of Uncut Gems. Google, by contrast, is a multi-trillion-dollar company that is decidedly unmemorable. It has spent two decades fading into the background of everyday life — the infrastructure under email, maps, search, documents, photos and cloud storage, constantly used and rarely considered as a “brand.” It is everything, everywhere, all at once, yet barely registers as something you “see” anymore. Powerful, indispensable and aggressively uncool. Which is why Google DeepMind’s new $75 million partnership with A24 is more than another AI-in-Hollywood experiment. The deal, centered on research collaboration with DeepMind — Google’s flagship AI lab behind systems including Gemini, Veo and AlphaFold — to develop new filmmaking tools and workflows through A24 Labs, has already set off alarms around town. And been roasted mercilessly by the internet.
A24 has already shown it is AI-curious. But this looks like something bigger: not a studio experimenting with a tool, but Google borrowing A24’s cultural credibility to make its own AI ambitions feel cooler, safer and more inevitable. The question is what A24 gets in return — and what it risks giving away.
Today I break down:
- Why Google DeepMind’s problem was never its AI models — and what it really came to A24 to buy
- How Apple cracked Hollywood, by doing the opposite of what Google is trying now
- Why a big slice of Hollywood is rooting for the deal to collapse; it has nothing to do with AI taking jobs
- How prestige brands fall apart one “smart” partnership at a time — and the $5 billion cautionary tale A24 should study
- The uncomfortable question A24 may not want to answer about its own brand
Don’t stop here
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