Google Backs A24 With $75 Million for AI Filmmaking Tools

Google has agreed to put roughly $75 million into A24, the independent studio behind Everything Everywhere All at Once and Hereditary, as part of a multiyear research partnership with Google DeepMind. The agreement, announced on June 22, gives the studio access to DeepMind's research and computing infrastructure and sets the lab's researchers to work alongside A24's own technologists on tools for making and distributing films.

What makes the deal notable is not the headline figure, which is small by the standards of this year's AI spending. It is the shape of it. This is the first time Alphabet's Google has taken a financial stake in a film studio, according to Variety. DeepMind has worked with individual directors before, among them Darren Aronofsky, but a standing arrangement with a full studio is new ground.

What each side gets

On A24's side, the work runs through A24 Labs, a roughly twenty-person technology group led by the studio partner Scott Belsky. DeepMind researchers will collaborate with that team on production workflows rather than handing over finished products. One early project, TechCrunch reports, uses AI to draft storyboards, the rough visual sketches a director relies on to plan a scene before anyone steps on set.

The terms also draw some clear lines. The arrangement is nonexclusive, so A24 is free to use tools from other companies. Google does not gain access to the studio's content library, and it cannot train its models on A24's catalogue. For a studio whose brand rests on the taste and control of its filmmakers, those guardrails matter as much as the money.

A careful step into a nervous industry

The timing is delicate. Hollywood spent much of the past two years arguing over generative video, and the 2023 strikes turned AI from a technical question into a labour one. A24 has built its name on auteur-driven work, the kind of films where a human sensibility is the whole selling point. Partnering with the company that makes Veo and the Gemini models is either a shrewd way to shape those tools from the inside or a reputational gamble, depending on who you ask.

Google plainly sees value beyond the films themselves. Whatever DeepMind learns from sitting inside a working studio, the messy reality of how scenes get planned, shot and cut, feeds back into its wider product line. A24 gets to test frontier tools on its own terms instead of waiting for them to arrive as off-the-shelf software.

It helps to keep the scale in perspective. Storyboards are a planning aid, not a finished frame, and a $75 million research budget does not replace anyone's job on a set. The more interesting question is whether tools built with a studio this protective of craft end up looking different from the general-purpose video models that have made the industry so wary. We should learn more once the first A24 production actually runs on them. For now, the studio behind some of the decade's most distinctive films has invited an AI lab into the room, and how it uses that access will say more than the cheque did.