The cover is gray, matte, and squared off like a field guide: no logo flourish, no winking tagline, just THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MOVIE CATS stamped in the kind of serif you'd expect on a university press title. Open it and the entries run A to Z, each cat treated as a credited performer with a filmography, a temperament, and a note on whether it bit anyone on set. This is a reference book. It behaves like one, with cross-references and spotlight essays grouping cats by the archetypes they tend to play on screen: the omen, the familiar, the deadpan bystander in the corner of a horror frame.
A24's shop has carried plush toys, scented candles, and a tarot deck for years, so a novelty book is not itself a departure. What is worth sitting with is the specific shelf this one occupies. A24 built its reputation on a curatorial posture: the studio that platforms Ari Aster and the Safdies, that releases hardcover screenplay editions as if they were liturgical texts, that treats its own back catalog with the seriousness of a film school syllabus. The Encyclopedia of Movie Cats borrows that same seriousness, the same 420-page density, the same essay format, and applies it to a subject that exists almost entirely as internet ephemera: cat content, the lowest-friction, highest-velocity unit of online attention there is.
That is a specialist's format wrapped around a mass-market subject, and it runs in the opposite direction from how most studios approach merchandise. The usual move is to take a prestige property and simplify it for retail: a tote bag with a minimalist line drawing, a candle named after a scene. A24 has instead taken its most rigorous packaging, the apparatus of academic reference, and pointed it at cats, a category with no built-in cinephile gatekeeping at all. Anyone who has ever paused a movie to screenshot a cat now has a 420-page justification for having done so, bound in the same visual register as a Criterion essay collection.
Hypebeast framed the release straightforwardly as a catalog: the outlet described it as a book that "treats screen felines as a cast in their own right, cataloging marquee characters and fleeting cameos with equal care." What that framing leaves alone is the shelf logic. A24's physical merchandise line already includes a companion object, a set of nesting dolls tied to its Robert Pattinson slate, released the same week. Reference book and nesting doll are different categories of object, but they are being sold from the same storefront with the same production values, and the gap between them is the real story: a studio whose theatrical slate trades on restraint is now the publisher of record for internet cat lore. The Encyclopedia of Movie Cats belongs to novelty retail now, filed under prestige packaging.