I wrote about the hot AI video startup betting against consumers, how data brokers have become the new Hollywood agents, how athletes are using AI to build their own media empires and why companies like Google are funding AI curricula at top film schools.
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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