Box office failures may be a thing of the past now that a new form of artificial intelligence can predict a movie's success before it's even made. Soon, AI could potentially greenlight movies in the future.

Founded in 2015 in Antwerp, Belgium by Nadira Azermai, artificially intelligent software known as ScriptBook has the capability of identifying a box office failure well before the movie is even made. By simply uploading a screenplay into ScriptBook, the software can create a fully detailed analysis of the movie - not only determining whether or not it will likely become a financial success, but crafting a full analysis of its characters, figuring out its target audience, understanding the difference between the script's protagonists and antagonists, and even predicting what its MPAA rating will likely be. Now, in an attempt to make ScriptBook a major component in modern filmmaking, Azermai is trying to win over major studios like Sony, claiming that the studio could have potentially saved significant money between 2015 and 2017 had they used ScriptBook.

Azermai presented ScriptBook at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, explaining that his software successfully identitifed 22 of the 32 box office failures that Sony released between 2015 and 2017 (via Variety). By simply uploading a PDF of the screenplay into ScriptBook, the software is instructed by humans, as well as a dataset of 6,500 screenplays, to determine the likely or unlikely success of a movie for the cost of $5,000 per PDF. And with an 84 percent success rate, Azermai explained that his software is three times more accurate than humans, adding, "Our mission is to revolutionize the business of storytelling by using AI to help producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers assess their risk.”

ScriptBook logo

As for studios not entirely willing to place the success or failure of a big-budget movie solely into artificial intelligence, Azermai stated that ScriptBook can at least help "validate the decisions" studios make. That said, the software is hardly perfect, predicting that Damien Chazelle's La La Land, which won multiple Oscars, would only earn $59 million at the box office, when, in fact, it ended up earning over $100 million.

While Azermai insists that ScriptBook is "very good at picking out artistic movies that do well financially," the apprehension of handing over the creative reigns of a movie to artificial intelligence is valid. Though movies are money machines like any other product, they have the unique quality of doubling as artistic forms of expression. So, when the human instinct element associated with filmmaking is set aside for artificial analysis, will that potentially rob audiences of potential classics that fail before ever getting a chance? Given that movies like Jaws and Titanic  (among several others) had notoriously difficult productions, ScriptBook might have flat-out warned studios from greenlighting them had the software existed at the time - so, utilizing the software as an advisor, as opposed to it being the sole authority, may be the safer approach for the time being.

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Source: Variety