The two A24 items on my desk this week sit in opposite corners of the studio's identity crisis, and neither has a release date attached yet. That's worth sitting with before anyone gets excited.
The trailer: "It Gets Worse"
A24 dropped a trailer for It Gets Worse, a "bleakly funny quarter-life crisis comedy" starring Andrew Scott, Lena Dunham, and Leo Reich. A trailer is marketing, not a theatrical commitment — no venue, no date, no screen count attached in what's public so far. What I can say from the description alone: this is A24 doing what it does when it's actually taking a swing — a specific, generationally pointed premise with a cast that isn't there for brand recognition. Reich's name on a project like this is the tell. He's not a four-quadrant draw. He's there because the film needs someone who can be genuinely unpleasant on screen.
The casting rumor: "Goblin"
Compare that to Goblin, the "raunchy" comedy currently "circling" Chase Sui Wonders alongside Kenneth Branagh, Skyler Gisondo, and Will Forte. Circling means exactly that — nothing is signed, nothing is dated, and the cast list could look completely different by the time this goes into production. I'm flagging it not because there's a story yet, but because the combination of names (Branagh doing "raunchy" is a sentence I didn't expect to type) suggests A24 is still willing to build odd, miscast-sounding comedies on reputation rather than algorithm. Whether that's a risk worth taking or just a stunt casting press release, we won't know until there's an actual film to watch.
The real release of the week isn't an indie at all
Buried in Screen Daily's running UK-Ireland release calendar is I Play Rocky, opening in the UK on November 6 via EFD. It's the film Film Comment reviewed this week, and the review is worth your time even if the film apparently isn't. The critique: I Play Rocky — Peter Farrelly's account of Sylvester Stallone making Rocky — opens by literally mirroring Rocky's own opening shot, then proceeds to structure the writing process as a training montage, treating "well-documented" Stallone anecdotes "like the stations of the cross" (Film Comment). The review calls it "a pandering, frictionless fable." That's precisely the house style this newsletter keeps warning you about — a movie that performs the aesthetics of a scrappy underdog story about a scrappy underdog story, with none of the friction that made the original worth remembering. If you're tracking what "prestige indie marketing" means as a trap rather than a compliment, this is this week's exhibit.
What's actually on the festival calendar right now
For readers trying to separate premiere season from release season: Screen Daily's festival tracker has DOC NYC running November 11–29, IDFA in Amsterdam November 12–22, and the American Film Market in Los Angeles November 10–15. None of that is distribution news yet — it's where distribution news gets made. If a documentary you've been hearing about suddenly has a distributor attached in three weeks, this is where that deal got done.
What to watch
Whether It Gets Worse gets a theatrical date versus a straight-to-streaming placement will tell you more about A24's confidence in the film than the cast list does. And if I Play Rocky picks up any awards-season momentum after opening in the UK, that'll be the real test of whether "frictionless" still sells.