Indie Hollywood darling A24 scored a massive financial hit with its “Backrooms” horror flick this year, netting over $330 million globally on a minuscule $10 million budget — the studio’s highest-grossing film of all time.
The movie’s director Kane Parsons, a 21-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, is an outspoken critic of AI, calling it “genuinely harmful” to creativity.
“We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop,” he told Deadline earlier this month. “That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”
Then, a revelation so shocking it was fit for an A24 feature: last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was investing $75 million in A24 as part of a research partnership with the goal of creating new AI tools for movie production — a bombshell development that
had fans in a full-on meltdown. The reaction shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The use of generative AI in the entertainment industry has been a lightning rod, with high-profile creatives, including Parsons, loudly voicing their opposition to the tech. A concurrent public AI backlash has turned fans into an angry mob — and it’s clear that A24 wasn’t prepared for the sustained backlash.
“Maybe we just have to accept that the A24 era is over,” reads a widely circulating post on the A24 subreddit. “Indie studios come and go. Like Miramax and New Line Cinema before them, A24 was always destined to be consumed by corporate interest.”
“I don’t know that this Google partnership will necessarily be the death of the studio, but if it is something else will replace it,” the author wrote.
Meanwhile, A24 has been trying to pick up the pieces as its most loyal fans lead a revolt online.
“This is a research partnership,” communications head Sophia Shin told Wired. “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.”
“Our relationship with our audience is something we don’t take for granted,” she added. “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,” Shin concluded.
Unsurprisingly, the fan community did not take kindly to the company’s attempt to patch things up.
“Why do artists need a voice in shaping tools they should never have any intention of using?” one user tweeted.
“The table has six legs,” one Reddit user wrote mockingly in response to Shin’s comments, a reference to early AI tools struggling to generate pictures of people with the right number of fingers.
“‘We don’t want to be on the sidelines and miss out on all of the loss in business all of the other companies will see because everyone is jumping on the AI bubble pop train,'” another user interpreted.
In short, the brewing crisis perfectly exemplifies just how radioactive any AI partnerships in the entertainment company have become. Still, despite some of Hollywood’s biggest names opposing use of the tech, studios continue to sign lucrative contracts — to their fans’ dismay.
More on A24: A24 Fans in Meltdown After It Enters AI Partnership With Google