Whenever I see A24 on a show or a film, I pay attention. They’re the kids at the cool table — and the closest most of us get to sitting there is watching what they make.
But when I saw the trailer for The Smashing Machine, it felt like a rehash — The Wrestler, The Iron Claw — a movie from another time. For the first time, an A24 release felt like a product of scale, not spark.
On The Town last week, Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw nailed the financial side: A24’s $300M raise at a $3.5B valuation means they now have to scale like a midsized studio — risking the dilution of the very brand that built that value. But they missed one question: do they go vertical or horizontal?
The question I’ve been asking about A24 since their raise—
Do they go vertical or horizontal?
Do they deepen the core — turning fans into community and community into business — or do they chase the studio model, scaling budgets, output, and reach?
Because that’s the fork every entertainment company is standing at whether they know it or not. I’ve been asking the same question about New Paramount…
A24 built a handmade brand in a mass-produced world. Paramount built the factory that defined mass production itself. But both are facing the same question on very different scales: where is the growth?
Why Vertical Matters Now
Thank God for Doug Shapiro.
As I was wrestling this week with how to frame this stack and whether I had the authority to write it (truly nobody asked me), he dropped one of his weekly doses of wisdom and just what I needed— Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom with the perfect subhead: “Why the future of media is selling more to fewer.”
Here are the headlines:
Attention is tapped out. You can’t grow on minutes watched anymore. We are all at media (over) saturation.
Creation costs are collapsing. As GenAI floods the market, content becomes abundant and cheap. The profits move to complements — products and services that live around the content.
The future is fan surplus. Superfans want to engage more deeply, more often, across more dimensions. The opportunity is to capture that energy — to sell meaning, not minutes.
Breadth has hit its limit; depth is unbounded. The companies that win will be the ones that monetize depth.
This is where my head keeps going…
A24’s Vertical Play: (And why this is about all of us)
A24 didn’t earn that valuation by chasing volume — it built a business out of taste.
For its fans, watching isn’t enough; you have to be tapped in. The studio leaned into that subculture, turning aesthetic integrity into belonging: high-concept merch,, and a logo that became shorthand for taste.
The challenge now is scale. The only sustainable path is vertical — deepening its core rather than widening its footprint. That means turning its aesthetic into a flywheel:
Lifestyle as Extension:
Not just “movie merch,” but MoMA Design Store — high-margin, artful products that express the A24 worldview between releases. Fashion brands.Live and Experiential:
Film is the entry point, but gathering is the glue. Pop-ups, salons, screenings, curated events that reinforce identity and monetize belonging.Creator and IP Incubation:
Sign the filmmakers, writers, and weirdos who fit the brand. Build a feedback loop between art, commerce, and new IP.Music as Emotional Core:
Music has always been the pulse. A small label or curated live events could anchor the emotional side of the business and drive loyalty.
When these layers reinforce one another, A24 becomes more than a studio — it becomes a self-sustaining ecosystem. Loops, not launches.
Which leads me to Paramount…
Paramount x Oracle: Can You Build Vertically with a Tech Spine?
We all know this part.
In 2025, Skydance and Paramount closed their merger and began trading as Paramount, a Skydance Corporation. The company reorganized into Studios, Direct-to-Consumer, and TV Media, with a public mandate to modernize and deliver “real efficiencies.”
David Ellison has been clear from day one: this isn’t a content factory — it’s a media-and-technology enterprise. Backed by a reported $100 million-a-year deal with Oracle.
They’ve also hired Dane Glasgow, a veteran of Meta, Google, and eBay, as Chief Product Officer — working with Cindy Holland on DTC, ads, immersive, and AI. If you’re serious about product-led media, that’s the hire you make.
So the ingredients are there: Ellison brings the capital, Oracle the infrastructure, Glasgow the product muscle. That’s the promise.
The harder question is what they’ll actually do with it.
We keep hearing how they’re “bringing tech to the studio,” but none of the specifics. So I looked at what Oracle is already doing for Hollywood right now — thinking maybe I could find the clues there…
What Oracle Actually Brings
Searchable libraries: AI turns buried footage into usable inventory — converting dead archives into living assets.
Studio-in-the-Cloud: Production shifts off hardware into rented computing power that scales up or down with projects.
Delivery and personalization: Oracle manages encoding, encrypting, and streaming. Paired with audience data, it can learn how people watch and feed that back into programming and marketing.
Enterprise + consumer brain: Oracle’s old strength was the back office; now it connects to audience data. The idea is one system linking what a studio makes to how viewers engage. Whether that builds loyalty or just better recommendations depends on what Paramount does with it.
In short, Oracle can be the operating system for vertical media — but Paramount has to design the layer that turns data into belonging.
What’s missing are declared verticals — distinct audience ecosystems with their own P&Ls, memberships, and commerce layers. That’s the leap from modernized horizontal to true vertical.
What “Going Vertical” Looks Like
A vertical is an audience-centric ecosystem built on:
A cultural spine: a world people already care about.
Membership and identity: a branded layer of status and access.
A product ladder: from free to premium, spanning digital and physical.
Creator integration: fan and creator collaborations that seed new IP.
Live anchors: recurring events that gather the community.
Feedback loops: data flowing between content, product, and commerce so every touchpoint strengthens the next.
Oracle can power the data. Glasgow’s team can build the surface. But the soul of a vertical is community — rituals, participation, belonging.
Paramount as a Portfolio That Holds Verticals
Paramount could evolve into a horizontal company that holds a portfolio of verticals — distinct cultural worlds with their own creative, commercial, and community engines.
Each vertical has its own GM, its own P&L, and shared back-office support for identity, payments, data, and media ops. Content still funnels back to Paramount+, but fans come for the worlds they love — and stay because they feel part of them.
Just like the old cable bundle, subscribers get access to multiple verticals (and pay the premium for it) — but they’re really focused on the one that defines them.
Going vertical doesn’t mean leaving casual fans behind — it means formalizing the relationship with the ones who care most.
Casuals still drop in for Top Gun 3 or a UFC fight. But verticals organize everything else — film, TV, commerce, live events — around the audience that identifies with the brand. Casuals watch; core fans belong. The studio becomes a living ecosystem.
How to Build Them
I see it in three fronts:
Build from what’s already working. Start with the worlds that already have loyal audiences. Don’t just make more — design systems around them.
Buy the audience, not the asset. Acquire communities with existing trust and participation, then layer in content later.
Build from the culture out. Anchor around the identity or values that hold the audience together, even when the IP shifts.
Applying Theory: The Perfect Move
If Paramount wanted to prove what a vertical strategy looks like in practice, there’s a single, perfect test case sitting in plain sight: buy Teton Ridge.
A couple months back, I wrote an Open Gardens stack about Teton — a privately funded media, sports, and lifestyle company quietly doing exactly what I’m talking about: building a full-stack cultural vertical. It owns The American Rodeo, controls its broadcast rights, runs equestrian and ranching events, sells Western lifestyle products, and is developing creator-led content, movies and TV shows around the same world.
In short, they bought the Openverse of cowboy culture to take reigns on its community.
They didn’t start with a show — they started with a world. They built the infrastructure of belonging first: the fans, the athletes, the events, the merch, the myth. Content became one spoke in a much bigger wheel.
Now imagine tying that to Yellowstone and its orbit.
Paramount doesn’t own Taylor Sheridan, and it doesn’t own his audience — it rents them for as long as he keeps making the shows. That’s the horizontal trap.
But combine Sheridan’s storytelling universe with Teton Ridge’s cultural backbone — the rodeo, the brands, the live events, the creator layer — and you get a vertical. CBS and Paramount+ get the live sports, docs and scripted content. They monetize the live events, the experiential, the commerce. And the studio gets something far more valuable than another hit: ownership of the culture itself.
That’s what going vertical looks like in the real world — not more content, but deeper gravity.
After I wrote the Teton Ridge stack, CEO Deirdre Lester reached out on LinkedIn and told me it was:
“the closest anyone’s come to describing what we are doing.”
She’s an impressive exec — sharp, grounded, and completely fluent in this idea of building from community outward. We eventually connected on zoom, and it was clear this thinking isn’t strategy-deck talk for her; it’s instinct. So of course, I asked if they’d ever considered selling to someone like Paramount. Her answer was fascinating… and not something I would share.
But rodeo isn’t the only play. You could build a vertical around Mission: Impossible — not just movies, but the entire culture of spycraft: immersive training, escape-room events, creator collabs that turn stunts into participatory entertainment. Or build one around Transformers — a robotics vertical connecting fandom, maker culture and subscription businesses, live robotics shows… I’m oversampling but you get the idea.
Done right, these aren’t franchises; they’re ecosystems. Communities that gather there can be monetized a thousand ways — through live experiences, commerce, creators, education, and media — and they grow far beyond the lifespan of any single story.
Nobody Asked Me, But There—I Said It
I’ve had multiple conversations lately with bankers in the entertainment space asking where capital is actually seeking opportunity right now.
Are investors starting to build business plans around verticals like Teton Ridge — companies that own culture, not just content?
The answer I keep getting is: it’s hard to model.
You’re going to buy an anchor business like a rodeo to build community… but eventually sell that community cowboy boots?
That’s the part the spreadsheets can’t process.
Horizontal growth still fits neatly into a financial model — output, windows, international projections, the legacy math everyone knows. But how do you model belonging? How do you forecast connection?
I get it. It’s hard. But the behavior is already changing, and the industry can’t spreadsheet its way into the future. The companies that figure this out first — the ones willing to take big, uncomfortable swings — will define the next era.
A24 already is a vertical — a handmade brand that grew by going deep instead of wide. Its next move isn’t to act like a studio; it’s to strengthen the community it already owns — to scale intimacy, not output.
Paramount’s opportunity is different. It’s not a vertical — it’s a platform that could hold them.
Instead of behaving like one giant pipeline, it could evolve into a portfolio of verticals: spy culture, Western culture, robotics, music — each with its own community, commerce, and creative spine.
The cleanest way to frame it is this:
Be horizontally diversified in structure.
Be vertically obsessed in execution.
Use the library to seed worlds. Use the worlds to seed communities.
Use the communities to seed products, events, and stories that feel inevitable — because they were born inside the culture you’re stewarding.
AI is about to make more content trivial. The scarce thing will be meaning. Build for that.
And here’s where it comes full circle: what studio should buy A24? (Their valuation is probably too high now, but go with me — I’m just trying to bring some symmetry to the end of this stack!).
If I were Paramount, I’d do it — not to integrate it, but to grow it.
This isn’t Universal owning a prestige arm like Focus or Disney buying Miramax to check a box on taste.
It’s something different — a structural play, not a symbolic one.
Let A24 remain its own vertical — powered by Paramount’s tech and infrastructure, not absorbed by them.
Let it be the cultural lab, the taste engine, the handmade brand inside the machine.
Let it grow its community with depth — that’s how you get to its best EBITDA, not by chasing volume.
Because maybe the next great M&E avalanche won’t come from studios buying each other — but from studios assembling portfolios of verticals that each own a community.
Keep an eye on the mega-creators — Dhar Mann, Dude Perfect, MrBeast — the usual suspects. They’re already doing it.
As the legacy world and the creator world converge in the open garden, that just might be where the next empire will rise.
All makes sense to me Ben :)
I just stumbled on this, but thanks for the shout out!
Would you say that Netflix is doing a good job with their Verticals?