For my article review, I have chosen an article titled “Warner Bros. Will Explore if Robots Are Decent Film Executives” from the website No Film School. The article talks about how major Hollywood film studio Warner Bros. will begin to use A.I. systems to help better determine what movies should be green lit and which ones should not. The system will use predictive analytics and data to help when choosing whether or not to green light a film, with the final decision being made by an actual person and not the A.I. system. The goal of this concept is to better identify projects that are more likely to have mid-range success, and hopefully better prevent Warner Bros. from having box office bombs.
I learned from this article that Warner Bros. will now use A.I. systems to better determine which movies are more likely to be successful, while also still having actual humans making the final call. Prior to reading this article, I had assumed that studios used certain statistics to help better determine what movies would be successes, but not any sort of A.I. system. Now, I can see that this is changing to use A.I. analytics to better pick out successful movies from failures. I personally found the article to be very interesting, as the idea of a huge movie studio moving towards allowing A.I. systems to have a say in what films are produced is a very big deal, not just for those who go to the movies, but for filmmakers and the movie industry as a whole.
For filmmakers in the movie making industry, the use of A.I. systems to green light movies may have both applications and ramifications. For some filmmakers who are making films which are similar to ones you currently see in theaters, such as superhero movies, I could see the system actually being beneficial. This is because the system will know that superhero movies are currently very successful and appear to be staying that way for the time being. Thus, the system may help that filmmaker’s film get green-lit.
At the same time, I see the A.I. system as being detrimental to some filmmakers. Suppose a filmmaker has a script for a fantastic musical film and the A.I. system is to determine if it gets green lighted or not. The system itself relies on current data and trends, and as of the very moment, musicals are not being widely produced or released as they once were, which may be from a loss of popularity. Thus, the A.I. will most likely not green light the musical film and instead green light another superhero picture instead. From this, it is possible that we will see less and less variety in films and an overall loss of creativity in the types of films that are made. Since A.I. systems use analytics based off current trends, they will be unable to identify any “breakout” films that are very different and highly successful which statistics can’t predict.
After reading this article, I have questions about how successful the use of A.I. systems will be, in that, will the movies they green-lit be successful? Another question I have is if other movie studios will adapt a similar concept of having A.I. determining what movies to produce. To find out more information, I can research the use of A.I. for work such as this, as well as search and see if any other movie studios are looking into beginning similar practices using A.I. systems or if they already are.
Article Link: https://nofilmschool.com/warner-bros-cinelytic-greenlight
Lukas Sedelmeier’s Film Blog 