Are You Ready For A.I.-Approved Movies?
Are robots going to be green-lighting the movies we see in the future?
That's a real possibility, according to a company called ScriptBook.
At a presentation at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, ScriptBook founder Nadira Azermai announced that her system correctly identified 22 out of 32 of Sony's box-office flops after analyzing screenplays of their films from 2015 to 2017.
"If Sony had used our system they could have eliminated 22 movies that failed financially," Azermai said. She added, "Our mission is to revolutionize the business of storytelling by using AI to help producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers assess their risk."
The Antwerp-based company was founded in 2015 and, its founder claims, has an 84 percent success rate in predicting the success of a film, which is reportedly three times that of a human script reader.
Considering that some of our favorite movies -- including '80s classics "The Thing" and "Blade Runner" -- were financial flops when first released, an AI-based system might be bad news for movie-making mavericks.
But, Azermai claims that ScriptBook wouldn't crush creativity: "ScriptBook’s AI will just kick out movies that follow certain formulas. It's very good at picking out artistic movies that do well financially."
One notable oversight from the AI-based system: It predicted "La La Land" would earn only $59 million, instead of its actual $100 million Oscar-enhanced-box-office haul. (Can it also predict Oscars?)
And while its founder touts ScriptBook's ability to analyze gender equality in scripts, would AI have a built-in tendency to favor scripts about, say, robots taking over the world?
