A24's Google deal tests whether a cult brand can ever really scale
Red Bull has managed it, so too has Patagonia, but other cult brands have suffered when attempting to appeal to the masses. Kriston Rucker, Partner at Love & War, looks at the reasons why, and what A24's new deal might mean for the company.
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When news broke that Google DeepMind was investing roughly $75 million in A24 to co-develop AI tools for filmmakers, the reaction inside indie film circles was immediate and sour.
A24 built its reputation on curatorial risk-taking, with projects like Beau is Afraid and Hereditary attracting a fiercely loyal audience that treats the studio's brand as a personality trait. Partnering with the company behind Veo, the video-generation model that much of the creative world sees as an existential threat, landed as a genuine betrayal to that fanbase, regardless of how carefully the deal was framed.
Partnering with the company behind Veo landed as a genuine betrayal to that fanbase.
To that point, A24 retains creative control, and Google gets no access to the studio's data or content library, while the tools – according to A24 Labs lead, Scott Belsky – are designed to expand what filmmakers can do, not replace them.
Above: A24's deal with Google's DeepMind has riled fans of the former.
But none of that stopped the backlash, because the deal collided with something deeper than logic – its community's sense of what A24 stands for. That gap between a company's stated intentions and its audience's perception is where every scaling brand eventually finds itself.
The cult vs growth paradox
Every brand with a devoted following faces a version of this test. Cult status is built, by definition, on narrowness, with a clear sense of who a brand is for, and an equally clear willingness to alienate everyone else. Growth pulls in the opposite direction. Chase both at once and something usually gives. The brands that scale successfully tend to solve this a particular way – they identify the single idea their audience already loves, and connect it to a wider world, rather than diluting that idea to court growth.
Growth pulls in the opposite direction [to cult status]. Chase both at once and something usually gives.
Patagonia offers a clear example. A brand built on climbing gear and environmental activism could have expanded by softening its politics for a mainstream audience. Instead, it went further into them, turning founder Yvon Chouinard's 2022 transfer of company ownership to a trust dedicated to fighting climate change into the loudest possible statement of what the brand had stood for all along. Growth followed conviction, rather than replacing it.
You see echoes in how Red Bull evolved a caffeinated drink invented for a niche market into a global media company, by doubling down on the extreme sports, edge-of-possible energy that built its early cult following, rather than smoothing it into something blander for the mass market. Similarly, Aesop scaled from a single Melbourne store to a global retailer under L'Oréal's ownership while keeping the design rigour and slow, editorial tone that made it feel memorably handcrafted from day one.
Above: Red Bull has successfully managed to scale by doubling down on its link to extreme sports.
Meanwhile in finance, challengers like Monzo and Stripe followed a similar logic, though in a less culty register. Both grew by staying obsessively focused on the specific frustration they were founded to fix, rather than chasing every adjacent feature a bigger competitor might offer.
Does selling more mean selling out?
The failure mode looks different but shares a root cause – changing the brand's DNA to fit a bigger audience, instead of finding what in that DNA already speaks to an audience. Supreme is a recent example. VF Corp acquired the streetwear label for $2.1 billion in 2020, and by 2023 had written down roughly two-thirds of that value, selling it to EssilorLuxottica for $1.5 billion…a $600 million loss.
Supreme's entire appeal rested on scarcity and unpredictability. Corporate ownership pushed it toward consistency and volume.
Supreme's entire appeal rested on scarcity and unpredictability. Corporate ownership pushed it toward consistency and volume, the opposite of what made people queue outside its stores.
Robinhood tells a similar story in finance. Built as the app that would let ordinary investors play by the same rules as Wall Street, it froze retail trading during the 2021 GameStop surge while institutional players kept operating — a decision that triggered lawsuits, congressional hearings and a wave of user fury. In the moment that mattered most, Robinhood behaved exactly like the institutions it was founded to disrupt.
Above: Supreme's sale and subsequent attempt to broaden its appeal has, so far, not gone as its new owners might have hoped.
Define non-negotiables, and stand by them
And the lesson extends well past entertainment, fashion or fintech, because it isn’t really about anything sector-specific. It’s about how a brand prepares for whatever comes next, be that a new technology, a new market, a takeover bid or an unexpected controversy, without losing the thing that originally made people care.
Purpose and values need to survive the growth intact; almost everything else about a company is allowed to change.
Purpose and values need to survive the growth intact; almost everything else about a company is allowed to change. Whatever a brand does next, from an AI partnership to a new market to an acquisition, its audience will judge it against one question: does this still feel like something we'd choose, or does it feel like something we're being sold?
A24's deal has yet to answer that question for its own fans. How it responds from here will say more about the studio's future than the Google money ever will.
