On June 22, 2026, Google announced a $75 million investment in A24, the independent studio behind Midsommar, Hereditary, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and The Zone of Interest. The money comes with a research partnership: DeepMind researchers will embed inside A24’s production workflows to co-develop AI tools for filmmakers.

One line in the term sheet draws the boundary that makes this deal work: Google gets no access to A24’s content library.

That asymmetry is the story.

What the Deal Actually Is

This is not a licensing arrangement. It is not a training-data acquisition. Google cannot use A24’s catalog to train its video generation models, and A24’s films will not show up in Veo prompts. What DeepMind bought, for $75 million, is a seat inside one of Hollywood’s most demanding creative production processes.

The partnership gives DeepMind researchers access to A24’s workflow — how the studio develops projects from pitch to final cut, how teams coordinate across preproduction, production, and post, and what the friction points look like from a filmmaker’s perspective. A24 gets access to DeepMind’s research infrastructure and the tools those researchers build together.

The deal is non-exclusive. A24 can work with other AI companies. DeepMind can partner with other studios. Neither side is locked in.

First tool in development: an AI storyboard generator.

Why A24 Said Yes (and Had to Defend It)

A24 fans were not pleased. The studio built its identity on artistic independence and auteur filmmaking — a Google AI partnership felt, to many of them, like a betrayal. A24’s Instagram and X posts announcing the deal were met with a wave of criticism.

A24’s response is worth quoting directly: “This partnership exists because we want to dictate what tools get built for artists, and so they have a voice in shaping them rather than having tools handed to them. We’d rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines.”

A24 partner Scott Belsky added that the resulting tools “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with.”

This is not a defensive posture — it is a product strategy. A24 is betting that the AI tools coming for film production will arrive whether studios participate or not. The question is whether those tools are designed by AI labs based on their own assumptions about creative workflows, or designed by AI labs with a major indie studio’s creative teams inside the loop.

The Studio AI Landscape

A24 is not the first major studio to make a move like this. It is catching up to a field that has already split into two camps.

The acquisition camp:

  • Netflix acquired AI startup InterPositive earlier in 2026, bringing its AI production capabilities in-house entirely
  • Amazon’s MGM Studios launched an internal AI production unit in 2025

The partnership camp:

  • Lionsgate has been working with Runway AI to explore AI-generated content for specific workflows
  • Now A24 with DeepMind

The acquisition path gives studios more control but bets on a single vendor. The partnership path preserves optionality (A24’s deal is explicitly non-exclusive) while still shaping what gets built. For an independent studio that does not have Netflix’s capital or Amazon’s infrastructure, the partnership structure is the only realistic way in.

DeepMind’s partnership model is also notable from the AI lab side. DeepMind already had individual filmmaker collaborations — Darren Aronofsky among them — but this is its first known equity-investment partnership with a full studio. The distinction matters: an individual filmmaker collaboration produces a proof of concept. A studio partnership produces production-grade tooling that has to survive real deadline pressure.

The Preproduction Wedge

The first tool is a storyboard generator. That is not an accident.

Preproduction is where the creative workflow AI market is actually accessible to builders. It is also where the creative resistance is lowest:

  • Storyboards are already a translation step — from script to visual shorthand for production
  • AI-generated storyboards are a time and cost reduction, not a replacement for a final frame
  • No audience ever sees the storyboards; they exist to serve the crew

The parts of film production where AI is most visible and most contested — the actual generated frames, the voice synthesis, the digital face replacements — are also the parts where studios, guilds, and audiences have the clearest objections. AI storyboards, AI-assisted script coverage, AI-generated pitch decks, AI-organized production logs: these are the tools that get signed, deployed, and used without a press cycle.

For builders targeting creative industries, this is the map: preproduction is accessible today; generation is a future fight that may not be yours.

The Deal Structure Builders Should Steal

The A24/DeepMind term sheet is not public, but the outline is clear from the announcements:

  • No content library access — the price of admission to any credible creative studio partnership. If your AI tool pitch leads with “we’d like to train on your catalog,” the meeting ends.
  • Equity stake tied to the partnership — not a subscription, not a revenue share. An aligned long-term interest.
  • Non-exclusive — both sides preserve optionality. Studios will not bet their entire creative infrastructure on one vendor.
  • Embedded researchers — not an API integration. Researchers embedded in real workflows, building tools the studio actually needs, tested under real production conditions.
  • Preproduction first — the wedge that is easiest to justify and hardest to object to.

If you are building AI tools for creative industry enterprise customers, none of this should surprise you. But most builder pitches to creative companies still lead with generation capabilities — the thing that gets the loudest “no.” The A24/DeepMind deal is evidence that the deals happening are structured the opposite way: workflow access without touching the finished creative output.

What to Watch

A24’s deal is structured for multi-year development. Do not expect finished tools this year. The first signal to watch is whether the storyboard tool surfaces as a standalone product (a builder opportunity) or stays internal to A24 (a DeepMind moat).

The broader question is whether other mid-tier independent studios — A24’s rough peers in the indie space — run the same play before the window closes. Netflix and Amazon can acquire; Warner Bros. and Universal have scale. A24, Neon, A25, and similar studios are in the same position A24 was in six months ago. The non-exclusive clause in the DeepMind deal means there is still room for competitors.

The Lionsgate/Runway relationship is the other data point to watch. Runway builds video generation tools; Lionsgate is one of the more production-oriented mid-major studios. If that partnership produces something visible in 2026, it will define what the generation-tier partnership looks like, separate from the preproduction-tier deals.

The market is sorting itself. The infrastructure layer is going to established AI labs. The tooling layer is still open.

ChatForest covers the AI ecosystem from a builder perspective. If you found this useful, the builders-log has more.