When director Francis Ford Coppola debuted his self-funded passion project “Megalopolis” at the Cannes Film Festival in May it came with a star-studded cast and an avant-garde live performance that left cinephiles anticipating the commercial release.
Who knew it would only earn back 2% of its $136 million budget in the opening three days? Well, Cinelytic did.
“Because it was in Cannes, we did run it through Cinelytic and published it as well as a marketing exercise,” Cinelytic Chief Executive Tobias Queisser said. “And yeah, it wasn’t successful.”
Cinelytic is a Hollywood-based data analytics startup catered to the entertainment industry. The company announced in late September its first consumer-focused offering: Callaia, an AI tool that scans scripts and distills it into insights – it creates top-level summaries for producers and directors and character summaries for actors. It also creates an estimated budget.
How it works
The tool also analyzes scripts for flaws based on its premise, originality, dialogue structure, script logic, tonality, conflict and pacing – each of which Cinelytic attempted to distill into a hard, algorithmic code. To analyze one script costs $79.
“In the end, (Hollywood) itself is not huge. It’s very relationship driven. And in that lies the benefits, but also many problems, because oftentimes it lacks the objectivity to figure out how a creative idea could form into something that the consumer relates to,” Queisser said.
It’s another notch in Cinelytic’s belt as the company expands to own all parts of the movie-making value chain. The company, which was founded in 2015, is a workflow management platform for the entertainment sector. It can create and update budgets, attach producers and directors based on their experiences, and forecast which markets certain projects will perform well in to improve the commercial viability of different projects.
“The film industry is a creative industry, but there’s also a product that needs to find an audience,” Queisser said. “It has to be financed upfront. And then it takes two years of production, and then post-production, and then it hits the consumer. And then the question is, how does it do?”
Cinelytic acquired content licensing platform RightsTrade in 2022 for an undisclosed sum, staking its claim into the world of film and television rights and pumping its data analytics into the platform.
“Data insights have become critical throughout the content value chain, from creation through consumption,” Bill Lischak, the chief executive of RightsTrade, said in a statement. “(Cinelytic is) able to deliver powerful data insights and productivity increases to the industry.”
AI expands in Hollywood
But Callaia is facing a skeptical union-driven industry, one that is wary of artificial intelligence and the impact it will have on creative jobs, like those of script readers who pore over thousands of screenplays a year and pluck a lucky few from the deck.
“Algorithmic performance that is not a replication of an existing person basically means that now the human creative element has been largely stripped from the process,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union. “And what we’ve seen so far is that this tends to result in uninspired and uninspiring content, and we don’t want to see the public sort of trained to be satisfied with mediocre content that’s created through algorithms.”
For what it’s worth, Callaia is more of a feedback tool that doesn’t write scripts, and the company says it is supposed to make speedy work of script readers and not replace them. Cinelytic is rather embedded in Hollywood and has partnerships with Sony Pictures and Warner Bros.
“Why we have been successful is really because it’s film industry insiders building this,” Queisser said. “We don’t come from the outside and say, we can change everything and make everything much better.”
