Josh Kushner Valued A24 at $3.5 Billion. Dior and Google Just Proved Him Right.

In the summer of 2024, Josh Kushner put his money behind a movie studio. Thrive Capital, the New York firm he founded, led a funding round that valued A24 at about $3.5 billion, 40 percent more than its valuation two years earlier, and Kushner joined the studio’s board. At the time, Thrive said it saw in A24 a company that combined extraordinary talent and creativity with innovation in its business model and technology.

It was an unusual bet for Kushner. Thrive made its name backing internet and software companies like Instagram, Spotify and Stripe, and has been an OpenAI investor since 2022, investing more than $1 billion. Like A24’s founders, Kushner has long kept a low profile and let his portfolio do the talking.

Two years later, all three pieces of Kushner’s thesis have shown up at once. The talent came first. Backrooms, the feature Kane Parsons adapted from his own viral YouTube series, opened May 29 to $81 million domestically, the biggest debut in A24’s history. The technology came next. In June, Google put roughly $75 million into the studio through an A.I. research partnership with its DeepMind unit. This month marked the start of a two-year creative partnership with Dior, led by the house’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson. Along the way, A24’s revenue has more than doubled over the past two years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A24’s co-founders, Daniel Katz and David Fenkel, have spent 13 years building the brand that Kushner bought into. They founded the studio in 2012 with John Hodges, who left in 2018, and they have stayed notably private despite the studio’s success. They also had outside money before Kushner arrived: in 2022, the private equity firm Stripes led a $225 million round that valued A24 at $2.5 billion. What’s changed since is scale. A24 is no longer an indie distributor with good taste but a cultural brand valued at $3.5 billion, with a cult following among young cinephiles. Its founders are now monetizing in every direction.

A24’s budgets have grown to match its ambitions. Civil War cost $50 million, the studio’s most expensive film at the time. Marty Supreme, estimated at $60 million or more, topped it.

Marty Supreme was also the clearest preview of the studio’s new playbook. Last winter, to promote Timothee Chalamet’s ping-pong drama, A24 dropped Marty Supreme jackets, a collaboration with designer Doni Nahmias that quickly became one of the most sought-after pieces of clothing after several celebrities were spotted wearing them. The film earned $191 million worldwide and nine Oscar nominations, though it went home without a win. For a few months, it was A24’s biggest movie ever.

Then came Backrooms, which A24 and Chernin Entertainment co-financed for roughly $10 million. The film has since grossed about $400 million worldwide, which ranks it among the highest-grossing independent movies ever made.

The more telling number was the audience. More than 70 percent of the opening crowds for Marty Supreme, The Drama and Backrooms were under 35—the demographic every luxury house and tech company is chasing. Parsons, 21, is the youngest filmmaker ever to open a movie at No. 1 domestically. He built Backrooms as a series of YouTube Shorts and still controls the rights to the IP; he has already floated the idea of turning it into a franchise. (The complication: A24’s most valuable property this year belongs to a creator who didn’t need the studio to find his audience.)

A24 has long treated merchandise as more than marketing. Over the years, it has partnered with streetwear brands like Online Ceramics and Brain Dead, as well as Seth Rogen’s Houseplant brand. It has launched custom product lines ranging from Midsommar incense sets to co-branded items with New York pizzeria Scarr’s Pizza. The studio now spans beauty through Half Magic, publishing and live theater. At Cherry Lane, it teamed with the New York restaurants Frenchette and Wild Cherry on a new dining room inside the theater. In March, it opened a temporary wedding chapel in Las Vegas to promote The Drama.

The Dior deal spans film, theater and live events. It centers on the Cherry Lane Theatre, which A24 bought in 2023 and reopened last year, with Dior as premier partner of New York’s oldest Off-Broadway theater. The partnership reaches beyond a traditional clothing collection. It also included a star-studded campaign and short film starring Anderson alongside celebrities like Sabrina Carpenter, Josh O’Connor, Drew Starkey, Camille Cottin and Sophie Wilde, all wearing co-branded shirts. “This is the start of an exciting partnership built around artists and storytelling,” Anderson said. 

For Anderson, the team-up is a cheat code for capturing young people’s attention as luxury brands continue trying to reach Gen Z consumers. For A24, it brings access to the global scale and resources of a high-end house. In retrospect, the Marty Supreme jackets look like a test run for the Dior deal.

Google’s roughly $75 million investment, tied to an A.I. research partnership with DeepMind, marked the first time Alphabet had taken a stake in a film studio. The check was about the size of Thrive’s 2024 contribution. The agreement runs multiple years, is nonexclusive and gives Google no access to A24’s film and TV library or its content data. DeepMind had already worked with individual filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky, but this was its first known partnership with an entire studio.

A24’s point person is Scott Belsky, the partner who oversees its technology and innovation work through A24 Labs. Belsky told the Journal that A.I. developers had wrongly pitched their products as a way to make films cheaper and faster. He argued the new tools would look nothing like the prompt-driven generative A.I. that makes people uneasy.

The deal also puts a studio with Kushner on its board in business with Google’s A.I. lab, while Kushner’s firm remains one of OpenAI’s most prominent backers. In February, Thrive confirmed it had put roughly another $1 billion into OpenAI.

Fans weren’t convinced by Belsky’s pitch. The deal couples the indie studio with Big Tech even as Hollywood remains anxious over A.I.’s displacement of creative labor, and the announcement drew immediate backlash on social media. A24 spokesperson Sophia Shin responded by casting the partnership as a way for the studio to dictate which tools get built for artists rather than having those tools handed to them.

Kushner’s investment in A24 was a bet that a studio could be a brand, with the brand worth more than any single film. This year, the market has started to agree: a record-breaking hit, a luxury house, and one of the world’s most powerful A.I. lab have all bought in. The risk now isn’t whether A24 can expand into luxury and A.I.; Katz and Fenkel have already done that. It’s whether the studio can keep the trust of the young fans who made it worth $3.5 billion while it sells access to them to Dior and Google.

Disclosure: Observer Media chairman Joseph Meyer is Josh Kushner’s brother-in-law. He had no role in the assignment, reporting or editing of this article.