The A24 Project

from The New Yorker

A24’s Empire of Auteurs

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

By Alex Barasch

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In November of 2015, the upstart film studio A24 had a problem. Executives had acquired the writer-director Robert Eggers’s stark, unsettling début, “The Witch,” at the Sundance Film Festival and wanted to make it their first release to open on thousands of screens. But both Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred as a teen-ager tempted by unholy forces, were then unknown. The story, set in the sixteen-thirties and scripted in Early Modern English, was a tough sell. To generate buzz, the company sought an unlikely partner: the Satanic Temple.

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