Key Points
- Google is investing about $75 million in A24, its first stake in a movie studio.
- The deal pairs A24 with Google DeepMind on AI filmmaking tools.
- Google gets no access to A24's content library or its data.
- A24's tech division, led by Scott Belsky, is building AI storyboard tools.
Google has taken its first stake in a movie studio, and the studio is A24. The roughly $75 million investment, announced June 22, is tied to an AI research partnership: A24 and Google's DeepMind unit will jointly build new workflows, tools, and techniques for filmmaking. Google already owns YouTube through Alphabet, but it has never before put equity into a film studio.
The terms
The partnership gives A24 access to DeepMind's research and infrastructure, with DeepMind researchers embedding to help develop new production tools — A24's technology division is already working on AI-generated storyboards. Notably, the deal does not give Google access to A24's content library or its data, a guardrail that matters for a studio whose brand is built on taste and authorship rather than volume.
The framing fight
Scott Belsky, the A24 partner who runs its technology division, has framed the Google deal as different from the AI pitches the studio had rejected — the ones selling the technology as a way to make films cheaper and faster. That distinction is the whole game. AI's arrival in creative industries has been adversarial as often as not; only days ago SZA accused AI platforms of training on Black artists' work without consent. A24 is betting it can take Google's money and tools on its own terms — as instruments for filmmakers rather than replacements for them. Whether a $75 million check from a search and AI giant lets a studio keep that line is the question the partnership will answer.
Source: Variety, Yahoo Finance, The Hollywood Reporter
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