You'll be seeing that A24 logo a lot on the big screen in 2026's final months. Between September 1 and December 31, 2026, the studio/distributor behind Moonlight and Lady Bird will release six movies (that includes Onslaught and Primetime, which have already been released). They all range heavily in aesthetic, tone, and filmmaking styles. Primetime's very transfixing, often heightened visual scheme, for instance, looks wildly different from Jesse Eisenberg's imagery in The Debut. However, one thing absent from all six of these titles is women directors. There are no movies from women directors on the docket for A24's final four months of 2026.
A24 isn't alone. None of Neon's seven movies across the final four months of 2026 (which includes the already released Hope) are from women filmmakers. Sony Pictures Classics has no women-directed titles on the docket for 2026's concluding months. These are the studios that supposedly counterbalance the major studios, which have done dismal work hiring women directors in recent years. Yet these major indie studios have contributed to this erasure, rather than subverting. How on Earth did we get here?
A Flicker of Hope Quickly Snuffed Out
Let's backtrack a little bit and go back to a soul-sucking Walgreens in January 2020. I was helping to close up this location, tidying up the aisles, making sure there were no bodily fluids on the floor that needed mopping up. In this domicile littered with odd smells and the same pop songs flickering through the speaks day in and day out, I grasped for any distractions I could. Thus, with no customers in sight, I whipped out my phone and pulled up Wikipedia's "List of A24 films" page. What A24 motion pictures were in store for the impending year?
To my surprise, several women-directed features were on the horizon. Of the 15 upcoming A24 movies slated for release at that time, eight of them were from directors belonging to marginalized genders. My face lit up in that Walgreens, a triumph given how intrinsically the place filled me with despair. Similarly, at the start of 2020, out of the ten Focus Features films set for release that year, six were from women filmmakers. This collided with exciting news that, in 2019, per a USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study, the presence of marginalized directors among the year's top-grossing films had reached a new high. Gender inequality had been far from solved in terms of offering opportunities for oppressed voices. However, the Variety piece reporting this study noted that 2019's figures for women directors were "a big jump from 2018 when a meager 4.5% of the top films were overseen by women." If that kind of jump from 2018 to 2019 was possible, further improvements were very much possible.
Those improvements were direly needed in all sectors of cinema, including the indie filmmaking world. A24, for instance, had a dismal track record with distributing and/or financing features from marginalized gender filmmakers. Out of its 11 2014 features, only two (Obvious Child and Laggies) came from directors who weren't men. Out of its 18 2016 releases, only two (American Honey and The Adderall Diaries) were from non-male filmmakers. Out of 15 2018 movies, A24 only put out two titles (Never Goin' Back and Woman Walks Ahead) from directors belonging to marginalized genders. The initial A24 slate suggested a new cinema movement that, like the New Hollywood movement of yore, promised a revolutionary approach to cinema...provided you were a white guy.
So huzzah that A24's 2020 slate was heavier on women and marginalized gender filmmakers. Unfortunately, COVID-19 put the film world into a tailspin when it shut theaters and the entertainment industry down in March 2020. For a second, though, it looked like there might still be some hope for opportunities for marginalized gender-identifying filmmakers even after this ongoing health crisis. 2023, for instance, brought out 18 A24 films and seven of them hailed from non-male filmmakers like Celine Song, Savannah Leaf, and Raven Jackson. Now, though, A24's 2026 slate has demonstrated a return to the studio's 2013-2019 norms. Out of the total 18 movies that will house the A24 logo this year, only three* will come from people who aren't cis-men.
Erasing Marginalized Gender Filmmakers Isn't New
A24 is a microcosm of both the erasure of marginalized gender filmmakers in the broader cultural scene and longstanding gender-based issues ingrained into the American film system. Alice Guy-Blaché created the first fictional narrative film. Madame E. Touissant and Tressie Souders established a precedent for Black women directors as early as the late 1910s and early 1920s. Unfortunately, the American film industry had been molded by rich men who dehumanized and erased people belonging to marginalized genders. The Walt Disney Company flatly refused to hire women. MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer's got a long list of sexual abuse allegations.
Peter Biskind's 1998 novel Easy Riders, Raging Bulls details countless reports about Easy Rider performer and co-writer Dennis Hopper physically abusing wife and partners. Former Pixar head John Lasseter was accused of years of sexual harassment and misogynistic behavior. Former Disney CEO Bob Iger, in announcing Lasseter was leaving the Mouse House in June 2018, put out a fluffy statement praising Lasseter and remarking that "we are profoundly grateful for his contributions." Thandiwe Newton alleged that former Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal pitched her one of the lead Charlie's Angels roles by "basically reeling off these stereotypes of how to be more convincing as a Black character." On and on the list goes. The examples of dehumanization never end.
The treatment of women in 30s Hollywood is disturbingly similar to how they're treated today, a distillation of larger American society's hesitancy to treat people belonging to an array of marginalized identities with respect.
More Money, More Adhering To Gender-Based Status Quos
Circling back to A24, something especially frustrating about the studio dialing back financial support for marginalized gender directors is it intersects with the Brutalist distributor financing bigger and bigger movies. After Everything Everywhere All at Once took off at the box office, A24 kicked its already brewing plans for expansion to the next level. The budgets for titles like Civil War and Marty Supreme now regularly exceed $75 million. The incoming Elden Ring movie from director Alex Garland allegedly costs over $100 million.
Typically, throughout Hollywood history, women filmmakers are considered especially persona non grata when it comes to handling costly titles. That's why only two $100+ million budgeted live-action movies in history (A Wrinkle in Time and The Marvels) have Black women filmmakers. Former 20th Century Fox head Stacey Snider frustratingly tried to justify the gender gap between filmmakers when it comes to costlier projects by saying:
"Studios don’t intend to block access, but the price for a first-time movie is so high that we get conservative in terms of wanting to work with people who have done it before...We partnered with AFI and created a competition for female students to pitch projects that were effects-laden adjuncts to our franchise films. What happens is that often first [women-directed] films, because they’re confined by their resources, are about 'my life on the farm.'"
Jon Watts can direct a movie about two kids stealing a cop car in (wait for the unexpected title) Cop Car and get the MCU Spider-Man movies. Colin Trevorrow can helm the tiny time travel dramedy Safety Not Guaranteed and immediately leap to helming Jurassic World. White men like Carl Rinsch and Joseph Kosinski can make their feature-length directorial debuts with $150+ million budgeted blockbusters. Yet years of helming genre films is somehow never enough to get Karyn Kusama or Rachel Talalay these gigs. Non-male indie directors like Cheryl Dunye, Dee Rees, and others don't get the chance to helm larger-scale titles. Safety Not Guaranteed is a "testing ground" for blockbusters. The Watermelon Woman isn't. That's the reality Hollywood keeps reinforcing.
It's also a reality A24 is now dabbling in. For a second, A24 was willing to co-finance super tiny (and high-quality) indie movies from marginalized gender filmmakers like Earth Mama and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. However, now that it's time to drop movies with $15+ million budgets, only white men get the keys to these projects. Director Alex Scharfman got $15 million to make his directorial debut, Death of a Unicorn, for A24, but filmmakers who aren't dudes have yet to receive such a budget. Ari Aster can plop a script down on an A24 executive's desk and get $30+ million easy, while Lily Wachowski struggles to get any financing for her movies. Funny how Aster can make box office bombs and still get moolah for features, but not Wachowski. Huh.
A24's ambitions to produce more costly titles that can contend with major studio works mean that the indie outfit is lapsing into the "only men can direct expensive movies" film industry norm. Any hopes that A24's 2020-2023 output offering more opportunities for artists belonging to marginalized genders would become a new permanent standard at the studio are long gone. Back in early 2018, the biggest A24 movie ever domestically was Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig. Now, the studio's forthcoming titles are largely expensive, male-directed and led projects.
A24 Is Not Alone In This Phenomenon
"The jury's finding that Mr. Trump "sexual abused" Ms. Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally - in other words, that Mr. Trump did in fact 'rape' Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law.
* = I'm being generous and counting the documentary Nuisance Bear, an A24 documentary sold to Mubi after its 2026 Sundance premiere. Bear doesn't have a 2026 release date yet, but I'll be charitable and say it gets an awards-qualifying 2026 run.
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