Hollywood Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Pick Its Next Blockbuster

For anyone who’s ever thought Hollywood’s output is formulaic and tired, the movie industry may be about to get worse. Major studio Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Cinelytic, which has developed an AI-powered system that can predict the likelihood of a film’s success based on such factors as actors, budget and brand.

Predictably enough, Warner Bros. will be using Cinelytic’s software as part of the research process it undergoes when deciding which movies to commission. Cinelytic’s platform can determine the ‘value’ (i.e. profitability) of an actor in any major territory and also calculate how much money a film is likely to earn in cinemas and through supplementary merchandising (e.g. DVDs).

While it obviously can’t measure how good a film will be artistically, Warner Bros. will likely use it during early production phases to separate ideas likely to succeed from those that most likely aren’t. This follows a run of several years during which the studio has suffered a number of high profile losses on such titles as Justice League and Pan, as well as a few instances where its output hasn’t performed as well as hoped (e.g. Batman v. Superman).

And it would seem that Warner Bros. won’t be the only film studio integrating AI into its decision-making processes. In fact, AI has already received a modest amount of use by studios up until now, so Warner Bros. entry is likely to open the floodgates even further.

For example, 20th Century Fox has been using a system called Merlin for several years now. In contrast to Cinelytic’s platform, Merlin uses AI and machine learning (as well as big data) to match particular films to particular genres and audiences. It does this by using a computer vision system to generate a frame-by-frame analysis of movie trailers. After labelling objects and events within each trailer, it then takes the data it has gathered for one film and compares it against data for other films. It might find, say, that a given trailer most resembles films x, yand z, which were popular with female teenagers.

By comparing datasets, Merlin helps 20th Century Fox identify the ideal demographic(s) for any given film. It also helps the studio decide how it should be advertising and classifying that film, insofar as Merlin links a film’s trailer to genres.

Aside from Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, it’s likely that other film studios and production companies have already turned to AI, without being open about it. For instance, Belgium-based ScriptBook uses AI to analyze a film’s script and arrive at an estimation of the revenues that film is likely to earn. Not only that, but ScriptBook’s platform can also provide likability scores for a film’s characters, profiles of its target audience, and even its likely IMDB rating.

According to the company’s CEO, Nadira Azermai, ScriptBook is already at a stage where the financial forecast it provides for each film has an 86% accuracy rate. In other words, it’s already working with clients in the film industry, even if it hasn’t gone public with the names of any studio or company.

ScriptBook was founded in 2015, but it’s probable that other companies will emerge in the coming years, since research into the use of AI-based film prediction is still ongoing. In August, researchers from Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea revealed that they had used deep learning to train a bot to forecast the likelihood of a film’s success, based this time on a textual summary of its plot. They trained this bot on 42,306 film plot summaries, in the end finding that it was best at predicting which films would be unsuccessful.

That the bot was better at weeding out ‘stinkers’ rather than classic films is encouraging. Because while the influx of AI into the film industry might imply that Hollywood could become even more self-plagiarizing in the future, it’s possible that studios might restrict the use of artificial intelligence specifically to making sure they don’t end up commissioning flops.