On Monday, June 22, A24 announced a partnership with Google DeepMind, Google’s premier AI research laboratory and subsidiary known for creations like Google Gemini and AlphaFold. This is a $75 million equity investment where Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is buying into the film industry for the first time.

The two companies are working together to build AI-powered tools for the physical production, editing, VFX, and distribution side of filmmaking. The initial project out of A24 Labs is an AI storyboard generator, designed to help directors rapidly sketch and map out scenes before filming begins.

Executives from both sides have framed the deal as a way to elevate the creative process rather than cut corners. A24 Labs head Scott Belsky emphasized that the tools won’t look like the standard “prompt-to-video” generative AI that people find clinical. Instead, the focus is on maximizing creative control and taking production risks rather than making movies “cheaper and faster.” DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis echoed this, stating that the best way to build useful creative tools is to construct them directly alongside artists.

A massive caveat of the deal is that Google cannot train its AI models on A24’s existing library of film and television projects. The deal explicitly protects the studio’s catalog from model scraping. Because it is nonexclusive, A24 remains free to collaborate with other tech entities, and DeepMind can partner with other studios.

This timing is impeccably ironic as A24 had a massive box office success with “Backrooms,” directed by Kane Parsons, a filmmaker who publicly called generative AI “genuinely harmful.” Like Parsons, many theatergoers and film lovers have a mutual dislike against AI in the film industry.

A24 prides itself on being known as that indie film studio where directors are granted creative freedom, and some look at this as a way to advance themselves to a bigger-scale Hollywood film studio, leaving their indie edge behind.

While I don’t agree with using AI to create movies as a whole, leveraging it behind the scenes could streamline production timelines and help get high-quality projects distributed at a faster rate. Whether we like it or not, advanced technology is inevitably entering the independent film space. But at least for now, human directors still hold the reins, using their creative genius to ensure that the soul of filmmaking isn’t lost to an algorithm.