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Twitter’s favorite film studio is moving away from fact-based filmmaking. A24 announced today that they will shutter their documentary division in the immediate future. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the studio didn’t offer a concrete timeline for when the change would happen, but noted that the five employees who will be affected by the move will stay with the company long enough to “transition” ongoing projects.
Though documentaries may not be A24’s most visible element, the studio has been releasing them fairly consistently, starting with 2015’s Amy, which chronicled the life of Amy Winehouse. Many of the subsequent documentaries produced by the company were then distributed by streamers or other companies; Apple TV+ distributed The Elephant Queen and Stephen Curry: Underrated, for example, and 2021’s Val Kilmer doc Val was distributed via Prime Video.
A24 still has a couple of non-fiction projects that it sounds like they will continue to handle, but the timeline on that isn’t particularly clear as of this writing. Talk To Me directors the Phillipou Brothers are creating a wrestling documentary Death Match, and A24 still has a true crime series The Yogurt Shop Murders expected. THR notes that A24’s decision here is reflective of a wider industry shift away from non-fiction programming—an area that the industry also swung hard in favor of just a few years ago. In its own reporting, The Wrap notes that this doesn’t mean that A24 will never produce a documentary again, just that the demand is no longer there to support an entire division.
