A24’s AI Bet Is a Lesson in Creative Influence for Fashion

A24’s $300 million horror hit Backrooms is a Rorschach test for AI anxiety. So when the studio announced a $75 million investment from Google, alongside an AI research partnership with the tech giant’s AI lab DeepMind this week, many fans found it ironic that Hollywood’s most influential indie studio was suddenly embracing the tech.

In the days following the deal announcement, comment sections on A24’s Instagram and X posts were flooded with criticism, as users declared the “death of the company” and other diehards launched petitions to end the deal. It’s a reaction as heated as those every time a luxury brand experiments with generative AI for image-making. (A24 had no comment on the response.) But it’s an interpretation that perhaps misses the more interesting story.

Much of the AI conversation in Hollywood to date has centered around the battleground for creative IP and licensing. Franchise-led studio Lionsgate’s partnership with AI company Runway centered on training models using its film library. Disney’s deal with OpenAI’s now-shuttered video-generation tool Sora included licensing characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy. And the $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic late last year set a precedent for the 125 active copyright lawsuits between major studios and AI companies.

The full details of what the partnership looks like in practice are yet to be ironed out, but A24 and Google said that in the first instance it was a “research” collaboration aimed at designing workflows for filmmakers. Google does not have access to A24’s content library as part of the deal.

Chiwetel Ejiofor in A24’s sci-fi horror film Backrooms, which was released last month.

A24 says this is not a content handover deal, but rather a partnership focused on shaping new creative tools for film development. “We wanted to ensure this didn’t look like every other studio deal, there’s no training using our data, content library, or IP,” Sophia Shin, the spokesperson for A24, says. “The investment was in us as a company and a creative partner, and not in our content. We want to work with Google’s researchers to shape workflows for our creatives, rather than them sharing their versions of workflows they think we’d need. Faster and cheaper are always the goals in the AI conversation — but our reason for this research is truly artistic control.”

If the first phase of the AI creative adoption curve is resistance, and the second is experimentation, A24’s partnership with Google signals that the third is about influence. “The fact that A24 — the studio most associated with original, auteur-driven filmmaking — is actively investing in AI infrastructure on its own terms, built around its own creative culture, tells us something important,” says Tobias Queisser, co-founder and CEO of film software company The Cinelytic Group. “The studios that are most committed to original filmmaking aren’t treating these tools as a threat, but as infrastructure. That’s the shift.”

Experts say A24’s partnership is ultimately a play for creative influence — one that carries useful lessons for fashion brands, whose competitive advantage has always been taste, too.

A24’s deal with Google comes at a time when the film industry is under financial pressure that Queisser describes as “existential”. Ever since the pandemic collapsed bricks-and-mortar revenue and streaming giants like Netflix fragmented audiences, studios have realized growth won’t come from physical development, but digital expansion. This pressure is only accelerating: in 2025, the film industry shed over 17,000 jobs, 18% more than the year before, and Paramount eliminated 2,000 positions.

At the same time, Netflix reached a 29.5% operating margin for 2025 (although the company did lay off a few dozen employees, less than 1% of its global workforce, a month after announcing these results). According to Queisser, only 3% of independent films recoup their budgets, and the financing sources that sustained the sector for decades have largely dried up. Meanwhile, AI companies are reaching trillion-dollar valuations, as the AI bubble shows no sign of bursting.

So far, legacy studios have largely sought financial certainty through consolidation, streaming scale, and franchise-first strategies. Or they’ve begun to partner with AI companies on licensing deals, like where Lionsgate partnered with Runway to build a custom AI model around its film library, and Disney licensed parts of its IP to OpenAI’s Sora platform, in what some see as a startling embrace of AI. “The inflection point was not a philosophical shift, it was financial pressure,” says Queisser of the industry’s increasing openness to AI. “The question of whether to apply AI tools has now become less philosophical and more urgent. The cost of not doing so is visible in every slate that fails to return capital.”

While much of the internet was shocked at A24’s AI collab with Google, viewed in the context of the studio’s growth strategy to date, it seems less surprising. A24 has built a $3.5 billion independent business by embracing uncertainty, making its name backing first-time filmmakers like Backrooms’s 20-year-old debut director Kane Parsons and betting on unconventional stories. It’s also carved out a reputation for its marketing machine by recognizing shifts in how culture is made, marketed and consumed, from fandom-building merchandise to social-first film world-building campaigns. Rather than competing on scale, it’s built its business on cultural relevance and anticipating the next big thing. Viewed through this lens, its partnership with Google seems like its next wager on the future.

“If you look at our history and how we’ve grown, there’s always been a deliberate attempt to move into a kind of white space or opportunities that didn’t exist,” says Shin, referencing A24’s early bets on the under-35 audiences of indie films, social-first marketing strategies, and how it entered into one of the first film company Pay-One deals with Amazon.

“With this deal, there’s absolutely an intent on showing that you can scale on your own terms, and that independence and growth are not mutually exclusive. We’re taking steps to ensure that we’re doing it entirely on our own terms,” she says.

At the same time, independent fashion brands are facing many of the same structural pressures: rising production costs, an early-stage funding drought, and growing competition from conglomerates with deeper pockets and proprietary technology. But so far, fashion’s AI partnerships have largely focused on applications rather than co-creation. L’Oréal is working with OpenAI to develop AI-powered beauty experiences, while some brands like Moncler, Valentino, Gucci, and Victoria Beckham have experimented with generative imagery and digital twin virtual try-on. But much of the industry’s AI conversation remains framed around efficiency, authenticity, and creative risk. What’s still missing are purpose-built AI tools for fashion’s own creative workflows — and the strategic partnerships to build them well.

Queisser points to how A24’s deal with Google could represent a blueprint for industries like fashion to move beyond the AI resistance and experimentation phases. “Industries resist these tools until the cost of resistance exceeds the cost of adoption. Both ends of the film business [both major Hollywood studios and indie studios] have now reached that threshold,” he says.

Google has historically been the go-to for developer workflow tools, but now, it’s clear that AI lab DeepMind is broadening its scope.

“The collaboration pairs a world-leading research lab with the industry’s most filmmaker-forward studio to help artists develop new workflows and techniques,” Google said in a statement announcing the collaboration. “This ensures the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them.” While Google could have partnered with any major studio for this research partnership, instead, it chose A24, a studio with outsized cultural clout.

At a time where Big Tech is obsessed with the question of taste, and increasingly leaning on fashion’s playbook to gain mass adoption of its AI tools, this decision sends an important signal to luxury brands.

First, by partnering with Google, A24 is able to exercise cultural influence and shape how AI tools are made for the film industry. It also gets a say in what Google can access, where IP experts say that sitting outside the AI conversation can pose a bigger commercial risk to creatives’ IPs. “The single largest pain point across both Hollywood and luxury fashion marketing is unregulated copyright scraping,” says Deborah Harpur, founder and CEO of AI talent licensing company FanClub AI.

“The partnership moves the conversation away from standard generative models toward building intentional, creator-led infrastructure, because it establishes strict guardrails,” Harpur adds. She points to how workflows, storyboarding, and project pre-visualization are currently where filmmakers are most readily adopting AI, because they offer cost efficiencies without risking the underlying creative IP. “It makes complete sense that a tastemaker studio like A24 would leave its core content library out of an initial tech partnership,’ she continues. “Independent studios are fiercely protective of their back catalogs, because protecting a multi-billion-dollar portfolio from copyright infringement carries an immediate, high-stakes ROI.”

Artistic duo Hunter Hornof incorporated AI into a Celine photoshoot for Pop Magazine, shot by photographer Reto Schmid.
Photo: Courtesy of Hunter Hornof, Reto Schmid, and Pop Magazine

Rather than licensing its back catalog or selling itself to a larger player, A24 is bringing a technology partner into its creative ecosystem while remaining independent. “We want to make sure that the filmmakers we work with are the ones still dictating whatever tools are going to be used next, and that there’s an opportunity to do that,” Shin says.

Experts say this could point to a new model for fashion creatives, by using AI partnerships not simply to automate workflows, but to secure investment, shape bespoke tools, and retain greater control over how new models evolve. “What interests us more than the investment is what it signals — that the conversation between technology and storytelling is moving into the center of the industry, not its edges,” says Alex Hunter, one half of the Hunter Hornof artistic duo, who have worked with AI to make fashion films with Torso Solutions, and for brands like Balenciaga and Max Mara. “If there’s a lesson, it’s about where AI actually belongs and who stays in control of it,” he says, adding that in their work, they’ve found the most interesting and “defensible” use of AI to be at the conceptual stage — for ideation, visualization, and building a brand world.

This is where A24’s Google deal could offer a blueprint for fashion. The studio’s greatest competitive advantage has never been scale but taste — just like luxury brands and their creatives, who compete on taste, authorship, and cultural authority. This is what the tech companies developing AI workflow tools are missing, and where there’s a potential co-creation opportunity for fashion brands.

“The limitation, as always, is whether there’s a strong enough point of view to begin with,” Hunter says. “Without that, you don’t build a world. You just produce.”