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A24 Made 16 Movies for Less Than 'Red One's Budget

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Now that 2024 is over, people are looking back at the year and analyzing the state of cinema based on what’s been released, what happened at the box office, and what critics and audiences have gravitated to. Part of this postmortem has been a critique of increasingly bloated budgets for Hollywood movies which are beginning to underperform or outright bomb at the box office, while some films comparatively succeed thanks to minuscule budgets. It’s not just a question of quantity vs. quality, as in many cases, studios can produce more quality films for less than the cost of a single, lower-quality film that’s more mainstream. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that A24 produced 16 films for nearly the same cost of Red One‘s budget.

Yes, the holiday action movie starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans had a runaway budget of roughly $250 million, which is how much it cost to make 16 A24 movies. That’s every single narrative feature film from A24 in 2024 (not counting their eight documentaries, which are very inexpensive to make, with a collective budget of less than $10 million). Those 16 movies are — Civil War, Queer, Love Lies Bleeding, Babygirl, We Live in Time, Y2K, MaXXXine, I Saw the TV Glow, Heretic, The Brutalist, Sing Sing, The Front Room, Problemista, Tuesday, Janet Planet, and A Different Man.

Nicole Kidman drinks milk in 'Babygirl'

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‘Babygirl’ is climbing the ranks of A24’s highest-grossing movies, looking to surpass 2024’s ‘MaXXXine’ in a matter of a days.

In fact, the entire cost of making seven of these films is still less than the ridiculous amount of money Dwayne Johnson was paid for leading Red One ($50 million). Chris Evans was paid $15 million for Red One, the entire budget of the Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh movie, We Live in Time. Collectively, those 16 films even made more at the box office than Red One. Additionally, other than Y2K and The Front Room, all of those A24 films have a critics’ score above 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Red One carries a 30% critics’ score. The Dwayne Johnson film nonetheless has a high audience score of 90%, but that never showed at the box office, with the film grossing just $186 million.

Dwayne Johnson Was Paid Enough for ‘Red One’ to Make Seven A24 Movies

Many of the aforementioned A24 movies are very good, and some are downright masterpieces. The Brutalist, with a budget of roughly $10 million, is a frontrunner at the upcoming Academy Awards, and has been in most film critics’ Top 10 lists for 2024. A Different Man is an important film that’s beloved by critics, and recently earned Sebastian Stan a Golden Globe for his performance. Civil War was widely-discussed, and despite being divisive, grossed $127 million at the box office, just $60 million short of Red One (which cost five times as much to make). Heretic and I Saw the TV Glow were two of the greatest horror films of 2024.

With all this in mind, it’s hard to economically, artistically, and even morally justify the behemoth budgets of major Hollywood films, considering each one could translate into more than a dozen interesting, unique movies.

Brandy Norwood is scared in A24 movie The Front Room

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‘The Front Room’ is a quite literally disgusting movie, and certainly a divisive one, failing with critics and the box office upon release.

And it’s not like the A24 films are lacking star power; that’s not why they’re cheaper to make. Great actors choose to get paid less in order to create art they believe in and take on roles that challenge them. In 2024, the stars of A24 productions include: Daniel Craig, Rachel Zegler, Adrien Brody, Kristen Stewart, Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh, Kirsten Dunst, Dave Franco, Ed Harris, Kevin Bacon, Hugh Grant, Colman Domingo, Halsey, Lily Collins, Antonio Banderas, Guy Pearce, Tilda Swinton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Giancarlo Esposito, Sebastian Stan, and many others.

These are big names who could certainly make more money by starring in mainstream productions, but they’ve chosen art over profit here, meaning they weren’t paid $50 million to star in one film (and then showed up late to set all the time and left their urine in bottles around the set).

Your movie ticket is a vote. It tells studios and artists that you’re interested in certain things. So vote for more and better films by seeing smaller productions. Let your voice be heard.

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