The dating app Feeld has revealed that mentions of the film studio A24 have increased 65% year-on-year in members’ profiles over the past 12 months.

Feeld caters for those seeking alternative relationship choices and overindexes for women and non-binary people, bisexuals and pansexuals, yet it reports that the majority of members whose profiles mention A24 are cis-gender male, straight and aged 26-30.

A once-boutique US distributor, A24, founded in 2012, now has worldwide presence and remarkable brand loyalty for what audiences perceive as its carefully curated portfolio of projects. Big hits from its back catalogue include Hereditary, Moonlight, Lady Bird, Uncut Gems, and Spring Breakers, as well as TV shows including Euphoria.

This year, A24’s releases include Covid western Eddington and Celine Song’s Materialists, about the dating travails of a professional matchmaker in New York, played by Dakota Johnson, who finds herself torn between high-status financier Pedro Pascal and broke actor Chris Evans. The movie won acclaim for its scepticism about modern courtship, and for its clear-eyed take on what many perceive as a transactional dating market.

To promote the film this spring, A24 launched a website, menofny.com, which invited Manhattan residents to input their vital stats – including salary – into a live, real-time ticker which ranked men according to their key attributes. The data appeared on screens at the New York Stock Exchange and on billboards across the city. Materialists has so far made over $100m at the box office.

Alicia Vikander in Ex-Machina. Photograph: Film4/Allstar

The company took a more viral approach in 2015 when launching Ex-Machina at the South by Southwest film festival. A Tinder profile was set up for Ava, the AI robot played by Alicia Vikander in the film, and users who matched with her were asked assorted questions including “Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?” before directing them to an Instagram page revealing the stunt.

Representatives for Feeld said that mentions of A24 were tracked in profiles across the globe, suggesting that the studio’s cut-through as a signifier of edgy yet still populist entertainment is now worldwide. It also appears to be intimately and energetically linked with the digital interaction of its key demographic.

A24 records eight times more social engagement than more veteran competitors, such as HBO, Disney and Marvel, based on the ratio of Instagram likes to followers.

Bloomberg recently reported around the particularly keen identification with the brand among US cinemagoers, quoting an A24 board member as saying that more than 60% of the people who go to see an A24 film in cinemas are motivated to do so because it is an A24 film.

The studio’s mushrooming popularity also means it finds itself at something of a tipping point, with overexposure and mainstream acclaim meaning it could forfeit its bespoke, clubby credentials.

Now employing more than 200 people in offices worldwide, the company is still owned by its original founders and investors, Daniel Katz, David Fenkel and John Hodges, with a limited number of stakeholders having boarded since 2012. A recent New Yorker profile of the company reported that it had had its most profitable half year in its history, quoting a top executive saying the business model was constructed to absorb the potential financial hit of passion projects such as Eddington.

“To use a baseball metaphor, we hit singles and doubles,” they said. “And when you set up movies to hit singles and doubles you can let your partner – in the best version of this – really take creative risks. We don’t need to gross a hundred million dollars. We don’t need to gross forty million dollars to actually have a successful financial outcome.”

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Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson in A24’s The Smashing Machine. Photograph: A24

Although the studio has converted 76 Oscar nominations into 21 wins, its thunder last year was stolen by rival Neon – which primarily acquires and distributes films, rather than originally commissioning and funding them – when Anora triumphed over The Brutalist.

This year, A24 has a number of Oscar contenders, including real-life wrestling film The Smashing Machine, whose star, Dwayne Johnson, seems a shoo-in for a nomination, as well as Marty Supreme, a 1920s-set ping pong biopic starring Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Also generating buzz are Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, with Rose Byrne and A$AP Rocky, and The Drama starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.

The brand has also diffused into a bricks-and-mortar premises, Cherry Lane Theater, in New York, as well as a cosmetics line called Half Magic. The A24 online shop has multiple T-shirts, posters, keyrings and more creative offerings, including a $125 Death of a Unicorn lamp shaped like a unicorn horn and filled with “unicorn blood” and a $75 scale model of the key construction from The Brutalist.