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There’s been a fair amount of hysteria surrounding Google DeepMind’s recently announced partnership with A24, the private equity-backed indie distributor turned film and TV studio that has successfully branded itself as a home to auteurs and artists while garnering a $3.5 billion valuation. For a certain type of post-hipster cinephile, A24 is practically synonymous with Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Celine Song. DeepMind, on the other hand, is not.
The company has been touting the sort of generative A.I. video, including a recent A.I.-assisted animated short at Tribeca this month, that would seem anathema to the very human creative work that has made indies like A24 (and Neon, and Mubi) feel like the final bulwark against the slopification of Hollywood. So it wasn’t unexpected when the discourse around last week’s announcement of a “deep research and development collaboration between A24 and Google DeepMind” went thermonuclear.
The pushback got so noisy across the industry that A24 was already doing some clean-up a few days later: “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,” a spokesperson told Wired. “We’d rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines.”
Okay… So A24 gets a seat at the table and $75 million of Google’s money. What does Google get in return? I joked with one TV executive that the entire team at DeepMind has more pressing things to worry about than winning Oscars. (C.E.O. Demis Hassabis recently announced that his ambition was to end all disease.) But the race to become the de facto A.I. video-generation tool for professional creatives remains wide open. That’s a huge opportunity, and perhaps no production company in Hollywood could give Google more street cred with the exact type of artist it needs to win over.
Google’s A.I. Flywheel
The DeepMind–A24 deal may reek of transactionalism, but Google has been more quietly courting Hollywood for some time. In 2025, Alphabet C.E.O. Sundar Pichai highlighted that “major film studios and entertainment companies” were using Veo2, Google’s main video-generation model. Last month, Pichai told developers that more filmmakers and musicians were using Veo3 in their filmmaking and songwriting process. And in this A24 announcement, DeepMind V.P. of product Eli Collins framed the deal as an effort to ensure “the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them.”
The unspoken goal, of course, is to encourage A.I. tooling within production houses and studios so that Google can scale its suite of products in lockstep. Google’s business was built off a very simple concept with search, but the company scaled its offerings as the use case for queries grew, and as more websites launched to meet those query demands—largely without any actual investment in the content, itself (outside of payouts to creators via YouTube’s revenue sharing model). Hollywood’s industry-standard software tools—Avid for editing, Pro Tools for sound, Nuke for compositing, etcetera—are also very enmeshed and difficult to dislodge. Google needs to buy its way in.
It doesn’t take much foresight to see how quickly Google’s tools could become integral to the filmmaking process in the so-called A.I.-assisted era. Imagine that another Kane Parsons type—one of the new crop of YouTuber filmmakers who may be less resistant to using A.I. tools in some capacity—gets a deal with A24 to make a movie. While working on that project, perhaps this next-gen auteur is exposed to Google’s powerful software suite, and subsequently continues to rely on those tools, effectively marketing them as he or she moves through their career.
A24’s Scott Belsky, who leads the company’s technology and innovation initiatives, and DeepMind’s Collins aren’t the only two executives thinking about how to convince anxious creatives to incorporate more A.I. tools, even at the experimental level. In March, Netflix, led by Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, acquired InterPositive, Ben Affleck’s A.I. company, for a reported $600 million; Jon Feltheimer is aggressively pushing Lionsgate’s teams to work more closely with A.I. video-generation company Runway; and Martin Scorsese recently became an advisor to Black Forest Labs, whose A.I. tools he says can help speed up storyboarding. Each initiative is, in its own way, a bet on fusing A.I. into the postproduction process—technology that could lower the cost of VFX and lower the barrier of entry for less-resourced filmmakers, even as it puts a lot of people out of work.
With their Google partnership, Belsky and fellow A24 co-founder Daniel Katz are presumably hoping to dip a toe in these waters without scaring off the creative community. But the harder test is whether A.I. postproduction tools also appeal to more-established filmmakers. Award-winning talent like Guillermo del Toro and Cate Blanchett have decried using generative A.I. in film and television. Others, typically more entrepreneurial types, like Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, James Cameron, and Steven Soderbergh, have praised opportunities for its use in pre- and postproduction. (A.I. firms are throwing around endorsement money, of course, so… grain of salt.) Here’s the real problem: In the age of YouTube, does any of it matter?
Google’s Hollywood Future
Infused in the hubbub around Google and A24’s new partnership are unspoken fears that this is once again a moment of Google-led inevitability disrupting a fragile industry. YouTube went largely ignored until it engulfed the whole town a few years ago. If Google becomes the dominant player in A.I.-assisted filmmaking software, what does that mean for the ever-growing unease regarding Big Tech’s shadow over Hollywood?
When this topic comes up, the question I often pose to executives is whether they’d ever stop uploading their content—their network’s shows, or studio’s trailers, even full-length episodes—to YouTube. Google is home to the largest video repository on the internet, and those videos are used by Google’s A.I. teams to train their own products. After a 2025 report found that millions of YouTube videos were being used to train Gemini models, a Google spokesperson simply affirmed that they “use YouTube content to make our products better, and this hasn’t changed with the advent of A.I.”
As it currently stands, YouTube allows for creators, which technically would include studios and networks, to opt out of competitor A.I. companies using their content for training. But there is no opt-out for Google, according to its own terms of service. Google has been sued by creators and studios over alleged copyright infringement and unauthorized use of copyrighted content to train its models. But the company isn’t backing down—and is leaving it up to the courts to determine its obligations toward its tens of millions of YouTube creators. When asked about lawsuits with creators, Pichai deflected by pointing out that Google is “not the only player in a big ecosystem.”
Fair—but Google is the only player with a video-generation tool training on content uploaded to its massive hosting platform. All of which leads to the ultimate question regarding this A24 deal: Is Google’s dominance inevitable in this new part of Hollywood’s underlying tech foundation? While there seems to be little competition, especially among the major players, an opportunity exists for startups built by established talent, craftspeople, and executives, such as Affleck’s InterPositive, that can leverage their existing expertise; realistically, there’s no one who understands where A.I. can be most efficaciously deployed in pre- and postproduction than those who are currently working in it.
Though, if history has taught us anything, if there’s a business that Google executives think can help cement its dominance—in this case making the company the go-to for professional creatives, aspiring filmmakers studying at schools like USC or NYU, and your everyday creator—they’ll just be snapped up.