A24’s acclaimed sci-fi thriller Ex Machina—starring Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander—has become available to watch for free on Tubi. Alex Garland also has started production on his next A24 tentpole, the video game adaptation Elden Ring, cont
The kind of sci-fi that doesn’t just impress you—it unsettles you—has landed within easy reach again.
Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, is now streaming free on Tubi, where it carries a “Certified Fresh” 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The website’s consensus for the film says Ex Machina “leans heavier on ideas than effects,” but still delivers an “uncommonly engaging sci-fi feature.”
It’s a striking contrast: the movie won the Best Visual Effects Oscar even though it was “significantly less expensive to make” than some of the other visual-effects-driven films released the same year. Ex Machina beat out Mad Max: Fury Road. Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The Martian. and The Revenant—a group that together cost more than $1 billion to produce.
Ex Machina also has a long paper trail with A24, stretching back to the start of Garland’s relationship with the indie studio. The film was released on April 24, 2015, and it ran 108 minutes. It arrived with Alex Garland as writer and director, and with Allon Reich and Andrew Macdonald as producers.
Financially, it was a major pivot point for both sides: Ex Machina grossed more than $35 million worldwide against a reported $15 million budget.
At the center of the story is a programmer invited to a remote facility by a technocrat to test out a humanoid robot. Domhnall Gleeson plays the programmer, Oscar Isaac plays the tech mogul, and Alicia Vikander plays the robot.
Garland’s next A24 project is already moving forward with momentum of its own. He has started production on Elden Ring, which is described as the most expensive A24 movie to date. The video game adaptation is the latest attempt by the indie studio to establish itself as a major player in Hollywood. following Garland’s Civil War. the Oscar contender Marty Supreme. and the more recent Backrooms.
Those releases have added up at the box office: all three movies grossed more than $100 million worldwide. with Marty Supreme nearly passing the $200 million mark and Backrooms sitting at nearly $350 million worldwide. With that progression. Elden Ring is expected to gross around half a billion dollars globally—or at least more than the $430 million haul of its fellow fantasy video game adaptation Warcraft.
The through-line is clear in the numbers and the careers: Ex Machina helped launch a partnership, and now Garland’s new A24 push is chasing the same kind of scale—just bigger, and arriving from a different starting point.
Ex Machina Alex Garland A24 Tubi Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh Best Visual Effects Oscar Elden Ring Domhnall Gleeson Oscar Isaac Alicia Vikander video game adaptation