But these days it’s not just creative dexterity driving the hipster outfit to sniff around all forms of middlebrow fare. In 2022 the company raised $225 million from a group of investors, including private equity firm Stripes LLC. The deal valued A24 at $2.5 billion, a staggering amount by the penurious standards of the indie film world. Now, bolstered by Wall Street riches, it’s making a run at scaling up its indieness. The company is moving into more costly genres such as sports and action while mining existing franchises, including a Spike Lee remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic High and Low and a new Peacock horror series, Crystal Lake, a prequel to the Friday the 13th series. In the works is a biopic of , based on the bestselling biography by Walter Isaacson, the whale of heroic, mass-market business yarns. (In the A24 spirit, it’ll be a Darren Aronofsky affair.) Apple TV+ recently scooped up A24’s drama series from hitmaker David E. Kelley, and in January Amazon Prime Video began airing Hazbin Hotel, the studio’s first foray into adult animation. Even 260-plus pounds of tender, prime-cut action hero in the form of Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is making an A24 debut, in the martial-arts drama The Smashing Machine. “We get very excited by the idea of changing the mainstream,” says Noah Sacco, A24’s head of film. “Broadening or scaling up or whatever you want to call it, is a part of that.”