The Cherry Lane Theatre Courtesy of A24 Commerce Street in the West Village is one of only two L-shaped streets in Manhattan and by far the more picturesque. The adjoining brick houses that form its corner were built in 1844 as the home of an Irish dry goods merchant named Alexander Turney Stewart, who invented the concept of the department store. A savvy marketer, Stewart had the idea to place cases of his wares on the sidewalk outside his store to clutter the entrance and draw a crowd. In so doing, he helped establish one of the fixtures of buzz-building in New York: the sidewalk queue as both an indicator of and a driver of trendiness, from Supreme streetwear drops in the ’90s and the Cronut in the 2010s to whatever photogenic foodstuff blows up on TikTok these days to ensnare young New Yorkers into — as SNL put it in a recent sketch — a “big dumb line.”
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It is on this corner, at the front of a line on a chilly April evening, that I began a 24-hour immersion into the New York of A24, the Manhattan-based indie film and TV studio behind such edgy, auteur-driven hits as Lady Bird, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Beef and Euphoria. In the past two years, it has purchased and overhauled the historic 167-seat Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street and opened a 45-seat restaurant within, Wild Cherry, now one of the toughest reservations in the city. Every night, in-the-know culturati line up to try their luck for rush tickets or for a barstool at Wild Cherry. I was one of them.
The idea behind the theater and the restaurant, an A24 source tells me, was to parlay the trust the studio has built among its core fan base of young cinephiles into deeper cultural engagement, rooted in the real world — and specifically in downtown Manhattan. But it’s also an exercise in brand-building, an effort to retain its cool-kid image as it grows.
The revamped Cherry Lane Theatre, which A24 purchased in 2023 Courtesy of A24 The company now finds itself at a crossroads, in some ways a victim of its own success. Renowned as much for its taste as for its marketing acumen, the 13-year-old studio has developed a cult following not just for its films and shows but for the A24 brand itself. It is financed largely by such private equity firms as Thrive Capital and Guggenheim Partners and was valued two years ago at $3.5 billion, more than 10 times the valuation of its closest indie rival, Neon. It’s hard to justify that amount with the kind of mid-budget art films the studio built its reputation on, which may explain why both its budgets and box office grosses have swelled in recent years as it has pursued a wider audience. But now it’s facing the thermodynamics of trends: The cooler something is, the more popular it gets, and the more popular it gets, the less cool it seems.
Thanks to Cherry Lane and Wild Cherry, it can now lay claim to one of the most culturally vibrant corners in New York, which has become the ultimate IRL manifestation of A24’s edgy ethos as it seeks to expand into live events, music, books, merchandising and lifestyle — all without sacrificing its cognoscenti cachet.
I set out on my 24-hour experiment to see if it was working. I arrived at the Cherry Lane 20 minutes early for a revival of Clare Barron’s play You Got Older, starring Alia Shawkat (Search Party) and Peter Friedman (Succession). In the mood for a quick drink, I squeezed past the ticket line to Wild Cherry, where a seat at the curved bar miraculously opened up. The hostess warned me that there would be no intermission and urged me to use the restroom first. I had just enough time to down a dirty martini and take in the neo-brasserie decor before a big dumb line formed outside the restaurant’s bathroom.
Founded in 1923, the Cherry Lane calls itself the birthplace of off-Broadway. It’s where Edward Albee premiered plays, where Tony Curtis was discovered, where a teenage Barbra Streisand worked as a set painter. A24 bought it for slightly more than $10 million in 2023, reopening it in 2025 after an overhaul. For an indie company that trades on the offbeat, there is perhaps no more prestigious cultural prize in New York.
Under its new program director, Dani Rait, a former SNL talent booker, Cherry Lane has put on the critically acclaimed one-woman show Weer and a string of FOMO-inducing events, including concerts by Florence Welch and Brandi Carlile, a surprise stand-up set by Adam Sandler and “Sundays With Sofia,” a screening series hosted by frequent A24 director Sofia Coppola.
The audience for You Got Older seemed about 30 years younger than the average Broadway crowd, and significantly more tattooed. There were many mustaches and many cocktails, which might explain why they excitedly laughed at bits that weren’t meant to be funny. As staged by director Anne Kauffman, the play felt of a piece with A24’s filmography, dealing as it does with death, sex, family and coming of age, with spurts of humor and surrealism. The audience lingered after the ovations. The playwright and consummate social butterfly Jeremy O. Harris was holding court in the aisle, fresh off his stint in a Japanese jail and his viral moment chewing out OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. It felt like the night was just beginning.
On to dinner. Wild Cherry is the brainchild of James Beard Award-winning chefs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, veterans of Daniel and Balthazar and the duo behind the fashionable French restaurants Le Veau d’Or, Le Rock and Frenchette. Several of the A24 top brass, including co-founder Daniel Katz and COO Matthew Bires, were regulars at Frenchette in Tribeca and invited Hanson and Nasr to build a new concept inside what had been a black-box rehearsal space for the Cherry Lane Theatre. On the night I went, Hanson was expediting thighs and fries, lobster clubs and (highly recommended) frogs’ legs Kiev as the bartender prepared the signature cocktail, a flowery gin, rum and cognac scorpion bowl you could dunk your head into.
A banquette at Wild Cherry, the restaurant by chefs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr in the back of the theater. Courtesy of A24 The most literal allusion to A24’s core business is a small red tub of popcorn for the table. With its movies, A24 has developed a reputation for letting artists be artists, and it’s done the same with Nasr and Hanson. “There wasn’t an A24 playbook that we had to follow, necessarily,” says Hanson, “but they’re in the business of creativity, of creating fun and interesting stuff. They let us do our thing.”
The New York Times called Wild Cherry “the hottest restaurant in town” and reviewed You Got Older glowingly. With that kind of success, A24 plans to expand its cultural footprint in the city, with more spaces and perhaps more restaurants. “Our goal is always and forever going to be, how do we ensure we have spaces for artists to do their best work, regardless of format or platform or space,” a source at the studio tells me.
For now, the closest thing to another A24 eatery is the new Ambassadors Clubhouse, a lavish Indian restaurant imported from London that shares a building with the studio’s offices in Koreatown and by extension some of A24’s aura. It may be the second-hardest reservation to score. (Try the Taro Tokri and Tikka Chaat and the Tandoori Margarita.)
You won’t have any trouble getting into the Barnes & Noble flagship store on Union Square, where A24 has set up an installation of merch that has drawn a cultish fandom online. The day after seeing the play, I hovered for a while watching shoppers gravitate to the sleek, futuristic display and browse its selection of books, LPs, collectors’ edition DVDs and assorted trinkets. Most of them were in their late 20s or early 30s. A stylish Korean woman with an oversized camel-hair coat and a Balenciaga bag circled the shelves and picked out a few items, telling me they were gifts for herself. (“I love their films, and their merchandise is really cute,” she said, blushing.)
The display is constantly evolving to keep up with A24’s releases. Today, there are soundtrack LPs; bound screenplays; pulp novelizations of Ti West’s slasher films; and art books, puzzles, card decks, an incense burner shaped like a sacrificial temple from Midsommar and scented candles meant to evoke various cinematic genres (horror, rom-com, noir).
The theater lobby Courtesy of A24 One man didn’t buy anything but photographed the A24 logo, a signifier of cool in its own right. According to the store manager, this happens all the time. It’s hard to imagine any of the other mini-major studios, let alone the big five, inspiring that kind of fandom. If the Criterion Collection — which also has a dedicated section at B&N — is a cinephile’s gateway to the past, A24 has sold itself as a portal to the next wave of indie cinema.
Shortly before 7, I crossed a drizzly Union Square to the Regal cinema for the New York premiere of The Drama, an A24 release. Yet another long line. The queuers seemed young, even by A24 standards, and unusually excited. I learned many of them are NYU students whom A24 invited to attend — and, crucially, post about — the event. (“You got to get creative, how do you make noise without the traditional levels of advertising?” an A24 source says.) Word had gotten out. The line had swelled into a throng, which broke into a collective squeal as stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya stepped out of a van to greet the crowd.
Robert Pattinson at the premiere of The Drama. Michelle Kammerman/BFA.com/courtesy of A24 Tickets were designed to resemble wedding invitations. All the pre-release marketing around the film had made it out to be a rom-com about nuptials. By the time it premiered, the controversial drama at the heart of The Drama — that the bride (Zendaya) had years ago planned a school shooting but not gone through with it — had not yet leaked. A24 had been careful to keep it that way. Pattinson and Zendaya introduced the film, and a message appeared onscreen: “Please silence your devices and refrain from spoiling The Drama until everyone has had a chance to see.”
Zendaya, star of The Drama. Michelle Kammerman/BFA.com/Courtesy of A24 It’s the kind of spoiler policing we’re more used to seeing from overprotective major studio franchises from Marvel, DC and Lucasfilm than from a scrappy indie film company. But A24 no longer is so scrappy. Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet as a 1950s ping-pong champion, was A24’s highest-grossing film to date, earning more than $200 million worldwide on a reported budget of $70 million. Yet its publicity rollout still had a guerrilla quality. At a surprise pop-up event in November on Grand Street in Manhattan, Chalamet fans waited in line for four hours, across two city blocks, for a chance to see the star and purchase Marty merch, including $250 windbreakers that had been worn on social by the likes of Chalamet, Tom Brady and ballet star Misty Copeland (before Chalamet made an enemy of ballet stars).
A Marty Supreme pop-up Lexi Lambros/courtesy of A24 I attended another awards-season A24 pop-up around the same time, this one for The Smashing Machine, the MMA movie directed by Benny Safdie, Josh’s brother and former directing partner, and starring Dwayne Johnson. For the three-day event, A24 had transformed a space on Canal Street into a vintage Japanese video game arcade.
“They really try to get to the DNA of what makes the movie the movie,” Safdie tells me about A24’s marketing efforts when I meet him at the event. “That translates to very unique merchandise. They’re saying, ‘Hey, we believe in this, and all this stuff is, like, one extra follow-through.’ “
Our conversation is interrupted when Johnson snags Safdie away to introduce him to an A24 fan and budding director he’d just met. By way of apology, he flashed me The Rock’s signature smile and firmly shook my hand. The moment was captured on an influencer’s video that garnered 290,000 likes on Instagram, by orders of magnitude my most popular appearance on social media. Such was the power of A24’s marketing machine (and Johnson’s).
Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson, stars of The Smashing Machine, at a pop-up event promoting the film, for which A24 transformed a Canal Street space into a retro Japanese arcade. Courtesy of A24 The pop-ups, the merch, the restaurant, the theater, the listening parties and other upcoming expansions into the real world seem designed to preserve the studio’s cool factor and anchor its growth in the fabric of New York. The fact that so few people can get in is part of the point, a hedge against the trade-offs of mass appeal.
Is it working? From the conversations I’ve had with their 20-something target audience, the answer is yes. “They have major blockbusters, but they’re still committed to independent filmmaking,” says 25-year-old A24 superfan Emily Siep, whose intro to the studio was 2017’s Lady Bird. “So many of the characters in A24 films or TV shows, they’re mostly in their late teens, late 20s and early 30s. You kind of relate to that.” She has since become a member of the AAA24 club — the cost of membership recently jumped to $10 a month ($100 year) — which gets her free opening-weekend tickets to the studio’s releases as well as a monthly magazine and deals on merch.
Lady Bird also was the pivotal A24 film for Leah, a 24-year-old social media manager at a New York magazine. When I meet her at a dinner, she tells me she’s desperate to get out of magazines and that her dream in life is to work for A24. She’ll even wait tables.
This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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