Warner Bros. may start using AI to decide which movies to develop

There's a lot that goes into developing a movie; From that very first pitch or concept, not a lot of time passes until a studio is spending potentially millions of dollars for production and marketing. At times, those movies are met with enormous success and bring in a lot of money, but other times, large failures can mean millions of dollars down the drain in losses. Like it or not, the movie-making business is a business, and Hollywood is always looking for new ways to make sure that their money isn't spent in vain.

According to THR, Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Cinelytic to use their artificial intelligence project management system to help guide their decision making process regarding which movies they decide to develop or acquire. "Warners will leverage the system’s comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage," reads the reports. "The integrated online platform 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 streams." Although the system isn't necessarily guaranteed to predict the next billion dollar blockbuster, it will help to "reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates." This is said to be particularly helpful in the film festival setting, where multi-million dollar deals are typically made in mere hours. Tobias Queisser, founder of Cinelytic, pointed out that the AI program won't be taking over any of the tough creative decisions made by executives.

Artificial intelligence sounds scary. But right now, an AI cannot make any creative decisions. 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.

From the AI executive which brought you such hits as SPACE SAGA SEQUEL 12: THE FINAL RECKONING and DISASTER EPIC 5: THE MOON IS ON FIRE, comes OH MY GOD, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE: THE MOVIE.