The studio signed a deal with Cinelytic to use its predictive analytics.

Artificial intelligence gets a foothold in Hollywood. Warner Bros has signed on L.A-based startup Cinelytic to use the latter’s AI-based film management system, according to an exclusive from The Hollywood Reporter.

Cinelytic’s system will enable the studio to make quicker and more data-driven decisions on which films to put on the production floors.

For example, the studio can feed variables such as actors, budget, genre into the system and then ask “what-if” questions to tweak the optimum result.

It 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 revenue streams.

Further, the Cinelytic AI-based platform will save time for studio executives by automating low-value and repetitive tasks. It will enhance monetary projections for the release date, film packaging and marketing, and distribution decisions.

Cinelytic useful in film festivals

The Cinelytic system is also extremely useful in a film festival setting. At these events, film purchase decisions are time-bound and suffered from a ‘seat-of-the-pants’ approach. It allows for more rational decisions and saves studio executives from getting needlessly caught up in a bidding war.

“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,” says Tobias Queisser. He founded Cinelytic four years ago.

Prior to Warner, Cinelytic counted Ingenious Media (Wind River), Productivity Media (The Little Hours) and STX (Playmobil) as clients.

Creative Heavy Lifting? No

Consider Robert Downey Jr.’s masterful casting in Iron Man.

Jon Favreau convinced the studio regardless of Downey’s indifferent box office record, drug problem and prison time. No AI-system could have predicted the box-office jackpot that the film hit – both for the studio and the actor.

So experience and creative decisions still count in Hollywood. And Queisser admits it.

“Artificial intelligence sounds scary. But right now, an AI cannot make any creative decisions,” he says. “What it is good at is crunching numbers and breaking down huge data sets and showing patterns that would not be visible to humans. But for creative decision-making, you still need experience and gut instinct.”

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