If you've ever recommended an A24 film to someone who really needed it — Past Lives when they were grieving, Everything Everywhere All at Once when they'd forgotten what it felt like for a movie to surprise them, The Bear when they needed to feel understood — you probably have a specific relationship with this studio. One that doesn't feel quite like brand loyalty.

Which is why the announcement on June 22 hit differently than a typical Hollywood deal.

Google invested $75 million in A24 — its first-ever equity stake in any film studio — in a multi-year research partnership with Google DeepMind. DeepMind researchers will embed inside A24 productions, building AI filmmaking tools from inside the studio's actual workflows. The first application is AI-generated storyboards using Google's Veo, Google's video-generation model.

Online, the reaction was fast and loud. On Kotaku, A24 fans filed their digital protest under the headline "Membership Cancelled." On film communities: "the last good studio is gone." The studio that launched Hereditary, Midsommar, and Waves — projects nobody else would have funded — just took $75 million from Google's AI lab.

I think the fans are ahead of themselves. But they're pointing at something real.

What's actually being built

Here's the deal in specific terms: AI storyboarding tools. Not scripts. Not performances. Not the uncanny-valley digital de-aging you've seen in the bad Netflix projects. Storyboards — the rough sketches directors use to plan how a scene looks before they film it.

A storyboard is basically the comic-strip draft of a movie. Each panel is a planned shot: the camera angle, the actors' positions, the rough lighting. Hitchcock drew his own obsessively. Spielberg still does. The idea is that you plan the shot on paper before you commit a crew of 200 people to the set. AI storyboarding means the sketching step gets faster and more detailed, not that the vision behind the shots changes. The director still decides what to see; the tool just draws it out faster.

That's a meaningful distinction. If you're going to introduce AI anywhere in the filmmaking process, this is the right first step. Storyboards are a planning tool, not a creative output. Improving how fast a director can communicate visual intent to a DP doesn't threaten what makes a film great in any way I can identify.

Scott Belsky, who runs A24 Labs, told the Wall Street Journal the tools "won't look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with." That's a statement of intent, not a contract. Worth taking seriously; also worth watching to see if it holds.

The deal structure matters more than any one statement, though. Google does not get access to A24's content library — not its archive of finished films, not its scripts, not its production footage. The partnership is non-exclusive, which means A24 can work with other AI companies and DeepMind can work with other studios. Neither side is locked in.

That's a structurally better deal than most AI-Hollywood partnerships of the last year, many of which included training-data rights over studio archives.

One more piece of context: Martin Scorsese is already prototyping his own AI storyboard tools, independently. If the most serious and unimpeachably respected living filmmaker is exploring exactly this use case on his own terms, A24 doing it with DeepMind's help is probably not the death of cinema.

Source spread

• Google DeepMind — official partnership announcement — hype. "Tools shaped by the creators who use them." All the right language, emphasis on artist empowerment and creative control.
• TechCrunch — Google DeepMind bets $75M on AI's future in Hollywood — builder. Best breakdown of the deal structure: what Google gets, what it explicitly doesn't get, non-exclusivity terms.
• IndieWire — A24 Opens Filmmaking Workflow to DeepMind — skeptic. Most critical of the Hollywood trades. Flags that "workflow access" is ambiguous and deserves closer attention than the official framing suggests.
• The Deep Dive — "Studio Beloved for Refusing to Compromise Artistic Vision..." — skeptic. Captures the fan-reaction angle without endorsing the panic; useful corrective to uncritical hype coverage.
• Kotaku — A24 Fans Mourn Its Death — skeptic. The "Membership Cancelled" reaction documented. Read for cultural texture, not technical analysis.

What's real. What deserves a side-eye.

What's real:

• The deal's structural protections are better than the industry norm right now. No training-data rights. No exclusivity. No archive access. Other studios have signed away significantly more for less money.
• Storyboarding is the least threatening place for AI to land in the filmmaking process. Planning faster doesn't replace vision. It's closer to a better pencil than to a screenwriting algorithm.
• $75 million at A24's budget scale is serious runway. A24 greenlit Everything Everywhere All at Once on a $14.3 million budget. This deal funds five more of those without touching box-office returns.
• DeepMind researchers embedding in actual productions — rather than building in a lab and guessing what directors need — is the right model for building tools that work.

What deserves a side-eye:

• "Won't look anything like prompted generation" is a statement of intent from a person at A24 Labs. It is not an enforceable clause. What this deal looks like in five years, after two renewals and higher commercial expectations, is a separate question from what it looks like today.
• First deals have the best terms. The precedent being set is that A24 will take tech money attached to AI research. Second deals tend to involve more negotiating leverage for the tech side. Third deals tend to look like what the tech company wanted all along.
• Non-exclusivity looks like protection until you map the incentive structure. If DeepMind's storyboard tools become deeply embedded in how A24 makes films, the non-exclusivity clause becomes ceremonially optional. Workflow dependency creates lock-in even when contract terms don't.
• The filmmakers — directors, writers, production designers — haven't said anything publicly. We're hearing from A24 Labs (a production-technology unit) and from Google. The people whose work is most directly affected have been silent. That asymmetry is worth noting.

What to do about it

If you're a moviegoer who cares about what A24 makes:

• Watch the credits on upcoming releases. If AI-generated storyboards appear in A24 films, the credits will eventually say so. That tells you whether the tools are actually being used and how transparently A24 is disclosing it.
• The archive protection is the clause that actually matters. If in a future deal renewal A24 grants Google training rights over its films, that's when the concern becomes concrete. Watch their future funding announcements for that change.
• Don't cancel the membership. A24's programming team is still A24's programming team. The next greenlight will still be made by humans with a documented track record of backing risky work nobody else would fund. That part of the deal didn't change.
• If you're a creator: the storyboard tools A24 co-develops will eventually become available to filmmakers outside A24. DeepMind's historical pattern is to productize research tools after the research phase. Worth knowing about when that happens.

Further reading

• Google DeepMind — DeepMind A24 research partnership — official announcement with full deal framing
• TechCrunch — Google DeepMind bets $75M on AI's future in Hollywood — best breakdown of the deal structure
• IndieWire — A24 Opens Filmmaking Workflow to Google DeepMind — most critical trade coverage
• Variety — Google Invests $75 Million in A24 to Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools — covers the Scorsese context and Belsky's WSJ quotes
• The Deep Dive — "Studio Beloved for Refusing to Compromise Artistic Vision..." — best capture of why the fan reaction is what it is