I've been on a lot of planes over the last fifteen months. In between refuelling my children with Haribo and apple juice, I've watched a lot more films than I usually would. Some good. Some downright awful.
Scrolling through the in-flight entertainment, what struck me is how few films try anything. Most of what gets made now is sequel, franchise, IP. The same story, sized up, rendered better. The thing that gets greenlit isn't the most interesting idea. It's the one most likely to fund the next one.
Sound familiar?
The games industry has been having a version of this argument with itself for years. The blockbuster model is straining. The mid-budget is being squeezed out in favour of one-person breakout titles.
Which is why A24 is such an interesting study
A24 doesn't make a lot of films. They don't have a giant studio backing them. They pick projects most of the system would reject, fund them at a scale the project actually warrants, and let filmmakers make the thing they came to make.
Moonlight cost $4M and won Best Picture. Everything Everywhere All at Once cost $25M and made over $100M. Hereditary, Lady Bird, The Whale, Past Lives. All of them small bets that paid out because they were the right size for what they were trying to do.
Backrooms proved the model is still alive. Adapted from a twenty-year-old YouTuber's viral web series about liminal spaces, it opened to $118 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. A24's biggest opening ever, by a factor of three. The biggest-ever debut for an original horror film. A film by a creator whose audience was already loyal, financed at the right scale for the thing they were making, marketed narrow and native rather than broad and broadcast.
And when nobody runs the playbook at all
Megalopolis cost Coppola $120 million. Made $14 million back. Self-financed, made entirely the way the filmmaker wanted to make it, with no system around it asking the harder questions.
Even a film great like Coppola couldn't escape it, because by his own admission he made the film he wanted to make. That's the trap. Not because his vision was wrong.
Because there was nobody in the room whose job it was to ask whether anyone outside his head wanted to watch it.
So many of the failures I've watched in the last two years have been, in one way or another, a Megalopolis. A team building what they wanted, at a scale that didn't match the audience, with no one empowered to say stop.
The games version
The A24 playbook for games isn't hard to imagine.
- Smaller studios. Right-sized dev costs.
- Designer-led, not committee-led.
- A clear-eyed view of who the game is actually for, and who it isn't.
- A community trusted to give honest feedback, because they're loyal enough to bother.
- Studio identity that audiences come to trust on its own.
- Long tails over launch peaks.
And hardest of all: the willingness to walk away from a game that shouldn't be built. To not green-light something just because it's already in motion. To kill the project that doesn't pencil at the right size, before it kills the studio.
Worth noting that even A24 is now being tempted by scale. They've taken $100m+ swings recently, and not all of them have landed. The discipline is hard even for the people who invented it. The pull of "go bigger" is gravitational. Resisting it is a permanent job, not a one-time decision.
They're coming for games
A24 has three adaptations in development. Death Stranding with Hideo Kojima. Elden Ring with Alex Garland. Overcooked with Netflix. An auteur sci-fi, a genre-defining RPG, a co-op cult favourite. Three very different games, picked for the same underlying reason. Each has a defined audience that genuinely loved them.
They're not asking which games made the most money. They're asking which games made the deepest impression on the people who played them.
The games industry might want to start asking the same question.