Warner Bros. Will Use an Artificial Intelligence System Company to Help Decide Which Films to Greenlight

Today in movie studio news, we learned that Warner Bros. has signed a deal with the company Cinelytic to use their artificial intelligence project management system to “leverage the system’s comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage.” In the report from THR, they explain that the “integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams.”

This sounds unnecessary and unlikely to catch the nuances that humans may see or feel going into the story or feel of a film. But what do I know? Head of Cinelytic and inventor of the program Tobias Queisser said this of the system:

“The system can calculate in seconds what used to take days to assess by a human when it comes to general film package evaluation or a star’s worth.”

But as it was pointed out by Zack Stentz on twitter (courtesy of /film):

“The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe was built on [Jon] Favreau convincing a bunch of executives that a middle-aged actor not long out of rehab and prison, who had described himself as ‘box office poison’ even during his earlier 1990s heyday, would be the perfect Iron Man…these analytics that purport to tell you which actor is worth how much in these territories are useless compared to the casting intuitions that end up creating magic onscreen.”

So like I said, those are the decisions that could end up being vetoed when a filmmaker has a good feeling about something that has potential to turn into movie magic. But who knows? Maybe this could turn out to help the studio, and I’m not against that, just as long as movies keep being made, and there’s room for some human conversation to work its way in, in special circumstances.

What do you think?