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Could Algorithms Be Better at Picking the Next Big Blockbuster Than Studio Execs? (wired.com)
In a world where artificial intelligence is no longer just a Spielberg-Kubrick collaboration, could algorithms be better at picking the next big blockbuster than studio execs? From a report: "Filmmakers are getting closer to understanding what moviegoers go to theaters to see thanks to neural networks fed off of data from previous box office hits," says Landon Starr, the head of data science at Clearlink, which uses machine learning to help companies understand consumer behavior. "Although this technology isn't spot-on quite yet, AI-powered predictions are likely stronger than the human calculations used in the past." And they're advancing quickly.
Vault, an Israeli startup founded in 2015, is developing a neural-network algorithm based on 30 years of box office data, nearly 400,000 story features found in scripts, and data like film budgets and audience demographics to estimate a movie's opening weekend. The company is only a couple years in, but founder David Stiff recently said that roughly 75 percent of Vault's predictions "come 'pretty close'" to films' actual opening grosses.
Scriptbook takes a similar approach, using its own AI platform to predict a movie's success based on the screenplay only. The Antwerp startup's AI analyzed 62 movies from 2015 and 2016, and claims it was able to successfully predict the box office failure or success of 52 of them, judging 30 movies correctly as profitable and 22 movies correctly as not profitable.
Vault, an Israeli startup founded in 2015, is developing a neural-network algorithm based on 30 years of box office data, nearly 400,000 story features found in scripts, and data like film budgets and audience demographics to estimate a movie's opening weekend. The company is only a couple years in, but founder David Stiff recently said that roughly 75 percent of Vault's predictions "come 'pretty close'" to films' actual opening grosses.
Scriptbook takes a similar approach, using its own AI platform to predict a movie's success based on the screenplay only. The Antwerp startup's AI analyzed 62 movies from 2015 and 2016, and claims it was able to successfully predict the box office failure or success of 52 of them, judging 30 movies correctly as profitable and 22 movies correctly as not profitable.
Pick some random comic book characters, re-hash an old story line with one new twist, profit.
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The answer is of course "No".
The reason being is that it's mostly random. Kinda like the stock market. You can't make predictions based on past performance. Something or someone may fall out of favor in the public's eye. Or something or someone may be suddenly popular.
They could hardly be any worse.
Cheese would be better at Picking the next big Blockbuster than Studio Execs, so the answer is obviously yes.
Fairly certain the only thing Studio Execs excel at is being morally bankrupt
Based on what's been released over the last 2 decades a brain damaged goat who shits on the movie titles would do a better job.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I thought this sounded familiar.
Like where in San Angeles, all restaurants are Taco Bell,
in TEH FUTAR, all movies will be Pixar Marvel Wars.
It is an inescapable conclusion.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When people call something 'formulaic' it isn't a compliment.
The goal is not to create good movies.
The goal is to create movies that sell.
That means pandering to the lowest common denominator of the movie going public.
Movies are not made to entertain people of above-average intelligence.
With what Hollywood execs have put out lately, there's no possible way anything could do worse. You could put it to a slashdot poll and it would do a better guess than what Hollywood can.
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All that matters is the title... Next great movie series: Star Wars X1 It is Star Wars... but with the power of X... so... $$$$.. $
So the same as the studio execs would give us, but cheaper and more reliably bland.
The Search For More Money!
AI is like the weatherman who forecasts that the weather in an hour is going to be very much like the weather is now: Almost always right, except when it's not. AI is conservative. If something was true up to now, it's probably going to be true in the very near future too. The whole "magic" is in figuring out how to best describe "now" so that an extrapolation makes sense. The result of applying AI to everything will be a very rigid world, where everything has to stay the same because that's what the AI forecasts.
... you could get better blockbuster predictions from a trained monkey than from studio execs!
Keep in mind that the basis of comparison here is studio executives. It seems like a pretty terrible way of picking blockbusters, so we should not be surprised if an AI outperforms that. The alpha male gets to green-light movies because as the alpha that is his prerogative, not because he has the best ability at that task.
Executives usually achieve and maintain their status by being the most successful at insider politicking and corporate infighting. That is not the same thing as being good at predicting box-office success. Especially in mature industries. We do see successful executive wunderkinder with insight, vision and skill in new markets because those talents are required to exploit a disruptive technology. Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are examples. But that's not typically the film business, and the exceptions (John Lasseter and Steve Jobs at Pixar) only re-enforce the point.
For any talent, we usually see a few extreme statistical outliers. A reasonable approach would be to find, by testing, those with extreme talent at predicting box-office success and compare their performance to that of both executives and to AI.
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the question is what made Avengers clear 1.5 billion+ and Batman v Superman only do half that? Can you quantify that so that every movie performs to the limits of the market (e.g. every movie goer sees it)?
I"m inclined to say yes. These aren't high concept art movies, they're popcorn flix. Like a pop song they follow a formula. Eventually that formula can be understood. Kinda like "PsychoHistory" from the Foundation novels. Eventually the math will be understood.
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Futurama did it with the Execubots.
Executive Alpha, programmed to like things it has seen before.
Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule.
Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate middle America.
A number of years ago I was excited to try a movie recommendation website. The premise was that you would rate a bunch of movies, and their algorithm would learn which ones you liked and which ones you didn't. It would then compare your results with other users. Suppose someone else rated a bunch of movies the same way you rated them, but in addition rated some movie very highly that you hadn't seen yet. That movie should make a great recommendation for you!
I started by spending a fair chunk of time rating a whole bunch of movies. I figured that the more I trained the algorithm on my tastes, the better results I would get. Finally, I decided to try for a recommendation. Lo and behold - up came some movie I had never even heard of, that was rated very highly by people who shared my taste.
Well, not only did I not enjoy the movie, I absolutely HATED it. I have distrusted recommendation systems ever since.
Maybe.
Than Studio Execs? Yes. I think a random number generator, or even a rolling rock can better predict the next blockbuster.
Grace Randolph has explained really well in the past how studio execs are completely out of touch with the audiences. They live in their own little world. There are movies that most people figured would be bombs, but studio execs thought would be top blockbusters.
It isn't like they don't have the data telling them the fact either. Take Ghostbuster for example. The original was made for 30 million and grossed 229.1, which about 114.5 million would have gone to the studio. Good return. Now look at the 2016 Ghostbuster, budget of 144 million. Then add on that the film was being extremely sexist against men. The initial budget logically seems too high, then they basically attacked the original audience.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Cough. Firefly. Cough, cough.
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But it's a pretty low bar for the algorithm.
(People aren't very good at predicting if something new will be a hit either.)
That said, it's a fairly high technical hurdle.
You are looking at movies which is a lot of data.
You can't just look at the content to decide.
You have to look at how it relates to what has come before.
IE. Is it new and interesting?
No doubt, these jobs will eventually be replaced, but I would not bet that they will be gone real soon.
you're talking about people recognizing the basic pattern "Marvel Movies Good, DC Movies Not". But what we're really talking about is the combination of story structure, pacing, casting, character archetypes, special effects and all the other aspects that make up a cookie cutter blockbuster movie.
The music equivalent is a four chord song. And if you look at the history of these sorts of things we've always figured out sound first and video later. But so far video's always been figured out.
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Every person in charge of acquiring new material for a big media company is always on the lookout for the same thing, only different. That's because the financial backers have two, largely mutually exclusive goals: guaranteed audiences and a runaway hit. In economic terms they're looking for an investment with higher than normal returns for its risk.
That's why pop culture is so clogged with retreads. It's only a matter of time before we see Star Trek: With Tits.
Now I happen to know more about publishing than movie making, so I'll focus on that for a moment. New authors submit their manuscripts on spec to agents and publisher acquisition editors. These agents and editors are usually pretty sharp, but that makes their time valuable. So someone like an intern has to wade through the "slush pile". It's a horrible job because 99.9% of the slushpile is pure rubbish.
What the slushpile reader does for hours on end is skim the first page, and toss, skim the first page, and toss. The first page is about ten lines of text in standard manuscript format. But if an algorithm could make the first cut, it would be able to examine entire manuscripts for the desired combination of (a) resemblance to past hits and (b) differences from recently published books, winnowing hundreds or thousands of manuscripts down to a couple dozen candidates fit for human eyes.
The exact same process could be used for movie or TV spec scripts. American broadcast TV shows often have a problem ginning up enough story ideas to fill an entire season, but accepting spec scripts means someone has to deal with the slushpile. So there's usually a couple of writers-don't-have-any-ideas episodes each season. If you could process a couple of thousand spec scripts and pick a dozen candidates that fit the show, you might find an idea you could use.
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To use this profitably, you need to toss in tons of dirt to get the few nuggets buried in the mountain of crap. The problem is that the algorithm can't tell you why a movie will be successful. If it could do that, you could skip all the crap generation process and just write a hit. Who is the genius out there who is going to figure out how to interpret neural network weights and features to build human understandable models?
That is all.
No male, no pale?
Pass the not stale test and the SJW AI approves the project.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
would be the result of AI choosing what the film studios make next. AI would work by rating what has been produced in the past. Someone with an idea for something completely new would not be highly rated by AI ... the risk is that they would not get the support to do it, so we all loose.
It's hard for me to imagine how an algorithm could really do a good job of "picking the next big blockbuster". On paper, the Justice League movie looks like it ought to be about as good as the latest Avengers movie, yet the Avengers movie is way better (compare IMDB ratings histograms: Justice League Infinity War). Zack Snyder's movies have made a lot of money. Joss Whedon has been associated with very successful movies like the first two Avengers movies. The actors have made very successful movies. The Internet buzz was huge for Wonder Woman. (And the Internet buzz for Ben Affleck was mostly that he was going to suck as Batman before he made Batman v. Superman, and very favorable afterward.) I can't think of any simple inputs one could feed into a model that would have predicted how poorly Justice League did overall.
The Wonder Woman movie did very well, and so did the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and so did the first Deadpool movie. All three were surprises: I didn't see any predictions ahead of any of them "this is going to be huge." I'm going to claim that what all three had in common is "heart". And it's hard to quantify heart.
Another possible ingredient of a blockbuster: show people something they haven't seen before, that they want to see. Before Deadpool, nobody knew that they wanted to see an R-rated Marvel movie with a character who breaks the fourth wall. Before the Guardians movies, who would have predicted that "I Am Groot" would be so popular or that Chris Pratt would become a really huge star? Supposedly Henry Ford said "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'" You can't guarantee you will give the people what they want by giving them what they used to want, or even what they say they want.
It's easy for an algorithm to pick something that nobody has seen before, but it's hard to guarantee that anyone will want to see it. I don't think it's really possible to quantify that for the algorithm.
Another example that comes to mind is Grosse Point Blank, which did very well when it came out. Or Napoleon Dynamite which just came totally out of nowhere.
It's my personal bias showing, perhaps, but I think the only meta rule covering all the above successes: people put heart into making those movies, and didn't have clueless studio execs stirring the pot and forcing changes that make the movie more like other movies.
I am hoping that the costs of making a movie will continue to come down, and in the future, studio executives will give more of a free hand to the people making a movie. The more a movie costs, the more the studio fears risk, but a true blockbuster can't play things completely safe or it risks being bland.
Note, heart alone doesn't guarantee success. There are plenty of movies that are now beloved that were flops when they first came out. There is a timing element. Also, some people just aren't good at making movies; they may put their whole heart and soul into a movie and the movie could still suck.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
That brings up a related topic of remakes. You can make a successful film and it can be remade with largely the same script but for it to bomb. This could be due to fondness for the original (Total Recall) or crapiness of the remake (Point Break).
Star Wars is not quite the same as the story is good but the need to introduce a more child-centric element (Jar-Jar Binks) caused some grief. Obviously the Ewoks got a similar reception in Return of the Jedi but as Tim in Spaced said "Yeah but Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like... fuckin'... Shaft!"
Only time will tell if we will look back at the Phantom Menace with fondness as Episode 20 pitches some grumpy Sith Lord against Crash Bandicoot.
How about we use AI to block some of these critics who give raving reviews for crappy films.
The next step would be creating them
As superficial as most people's tastes are these days, it is not at all surprising that algorithms could predict people's tastes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqLUbmpuVw4
Hollywood already has a robot that performs this function....
As neither are good at much of anything.
How about AI to replace humans to give viewers of movies original concepts that are not rehashed crap?
Make a movie about talking monkeys on another planet to symbolize the existentialism of ..... oh screw it. Give me explosions.
It's exactly this kind of thinking that is destroying the film experience for me. I like surprises and originality. If you always look to the past you end up parading the same stale tropes that we've seen over and over again.
The "hero" has to overcome a challenge. The "bad" guys are winning. Hero gets captured. Hero miraculously escapes. Hero defeats the bad guys and enjoys post victory coitus with love interest. This is especially disappointing for sci-fi because it's supposed to be forward looking.
What we need is original thinking to make film exciting, not some algorithim driven profit formula that gets the cattle to line up for another CG filed movie of explosions and boobs. Film making is an art and art is about creativity. There is no such thing as a creative algorithim.
and so would throwing a dart at a wall of randomized titles.
Could Algorithms Be Better at Picking the Next Big Blockbuster Than Studio Execs?
I wasn't aware they were even working on algorithms to pick studio executives.
-Dave
Not that the studio execs have done that well, but occasionally one slips and tries making something NEW. Which occasionally is actually GOOD. Now we'll get nothing but tired superhero movies with ever more ridiculous effects.
In a century, we'll be the pet mice of our robot overlords. I'm beginning to see what the hamster wheel for humans will look like.
Formulas evaluating formulas.
founder David Stiff recently said that roughly 75 percent of Vault's
predictions "come 'pretty close'" to films' actual opening grosses.
In other words, it doesn't fucking work.