When Florence Pugh said that Thunderbolts*, her new ensemble Marvel film featuring a bunch of minor characters, “ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes,” she and her employers knew exactly what they were doing: riling up the very online Letterboxd-obsessed cinephiles who had become bored of superhero costume drama. Was the Walt Disney Co., worth around $200 billion, really calling itself “indie”?
On cue, Marvel dropped a trailer that highlighted all of the film’s connections to A24, the New York-based indie film studio darlings. They flashed across across the trailer: “The writers & director of Beef,” the acclaimed revenge series from Netfix, read one. “The cinematographer of The Green Knight,” crowed another. And it seemed to have worked, with critics and audiences alike praising Thunderbolts* for, as one user on X put it, sneaking one “past the boardroom.”
On the face of it, the idea that Marvel could make something “indie” seems ludicrous. Independent films refer to those made outside the Hollywood studio system. Disney, owner of everything from Toy Story to Luke Skywalker to The Simpsons, is the system. But maybe it’s not so simple.
By using the term indie, both A24 and Disney not only appeal to the celluloid-worshiping film bros of today, but are feeding off the nostalgia from a different age in American cinema: When Jim Jarmusch spent four years in the 1980s to make Stranger Than Paradise using leftover black-and-white film stock from another movie, or when Robert Rodriguez enrolled in medical experiments to get the $7,000 he needed to make El Mariachi in the early ’90s.
“Independent filmmakers,” Quentin Tarantino once said, “spend all the money they have to make the movie. Money they don’t have. ... The movie can be as good as it’s gonna be, or as bad as it’s gonna be, but it’s theirs.”
Faced with no stars and no budget for the kind of spectacles produced by Hollywood, the indie filmmakers of yesteryear focused on telling riskier and more personal stories. Often in art, outsider status evolves into signatures that connect with an audience. But the truth is, we don’t really take no-budget films like Stranger Than Paradise and put them on the big screen anymore. That world no longer exists.
A24, with a sequence of interesting and genre-defying winners such as Everything Everywhere All At Once, has become the heir of that certain kind of auteur-driven filmmaking, giving space to younger directors such as Hereditary’s Ari Aster to take risks. But A24 itself was valued at $3.5 billion in its 2024 funding round, infused with private-equity dollars. Is that really indie? On this spectrum, when the word has been reduced to an aesthetic, Disney is as indie as anything else. We may long for the outsiders to take over again. But all we have left is the vibe.
If you want to see a true indie, someone creating what they want with a camera and no money, just pull up any person making day-in-the-life videos for TikTok or YouTube. The latter, of course, is owned by Google, which is now worth $2.1 trillion. All are huge corporations. A filmmaker working today has to pick their poison.
Indeed, audiences have been rushing to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. But for him to get here, Coogler made his indie debut, Fruitvale Station, for less than $1 million, before moving on to two Black Panther films for Marvel (which grossed more than $2 billion) and the Rocky spinoff Creed. It took Coogler more than 10 years of proving his bankability to tell an original, big-budget story not connected to a franchise.
When Disney does work with directors outside the system, it doesn’t know what to do with them. They are often reduced to making generic work for hire; think Barry Jenkins going from a James Baldwin adaptation to The Lion King prequel Mufasa: The Lion King, or Chloé Zhao, from the tender Nomadland to Harry Styles cameos in The Eternals.
The fantastic Argentine director Lucrecia Martel was approached about directing Marvel’s Black Widow, only to find the studio was seeking another woman to direct the movie’s star. “Don’t worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that,” Martel, in an interview with Variety, later recalled studio representatives telling her. “I was thinking, Well I would love to meet Scarlett Johansson but also I would love to make the action sequences.”
Lost amid debate of what’s indie and what isn’t are the filmmakers themselves. For those who are still independent, life is harder than ever. Brady Corbet spent seven years raising the $10 million needed to make The Brutalist. Only after the hard work was done was the film picked up by A24. Corbet says he made no money from the sale. “I’ve spoken to many filmmakers that have films that are nominated this year that can’t pay their rent,” Corbet said, being interviewed as an Oscar-nominated director.
The eventual winner of Best Director this year, Sean Baker for Anora, has talked about how he can only make his films because he does not have children or expect to own a home.
So why does he do it? “Some of us want to make personal films that are intended for theatrical release with subject matter that would never be greenlit by the big studios,” Baker has said.
There, at last, is an honest definition of “indie.”
Kabir Chibber, a writer and filmmaker who lives in New York, was a 2019 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.