Movie Studios Could Soon Use Machine Learning To Read Scripts

What makes a movie good or bad? There are a lot of things to take into consideration, such as the directing, the acting, the post-processing, and of course the most important factor: the script itself, since this pretty much dictates how the movie should play out and gives the plot/story behind it.

However in the future, it seems that there is a chance that all movie studios would need to do is feed the script to a robot, after which it will determine if it has what it takes to be a money-maker before deciding whether or not to go ahead with it. This is thanks to a tool called ScriptBook, an idea conceived by Nadira Azermai that uses machine learning to try and determine whether or not a script could lead to a movie being a flop or not.

To teach ScriptBook how to read and identify scripts, it was fed 4,000 scripts and 10,000 movies during the first six months, after which an algorithm was developed that would judge future screenplays based on 220 parameters to determine its financial performance. The team also had to try and teach the AI about “likability”, because on paper some characters seem quite distasteful/unlikable, but are actually the opposite when watched on screen.

So far ScriptBook seems to be able to make predictions with relative success. For example the remake of Point Break which looked promising, saw ScriptBook estimate it would earn $31 million, and the actual numbers were $28.8 million which is pretty close. Speaking to Engadget, Azermai says that there are also plans to offer a version of ScriptBook to screenwriters where presumably it would be used to determine if their scripts would be well-received or not.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General, Robots
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), Movies